Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

A kid is playing a small piano in an alleyway. This is one example of a scene that makes Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 so great: even a small detail of urban life, like this one, is full of life in this movie, that is set in Paris during two hours packed with emotional scales. Cléo is a singer worrying about the diagnosis of a cancer tumor. The film follows her - from 5 to 7, and it goes through the tumult of her emotional life with a lightness and liveliness that makes the story all but a lugubrious brooding on mortality. The complexity, but also sometimes strangely fleeting quality, of Cléos emotions is beautifully captured. Thus, the film contains both seriousness and a sense of playfulness. Even when the film seems to burst with urban life and detailed settings we never lose track of Cléo and the things she goes through. She is used to being admired, looked at, desired. In the film, we see her differing attitude towards this attention. In one moment, we see her flirting and singing with a bunch of guys playing at a piano. In another scene, Cléo is walking on the street, pondering her impending diagnosis. The scenes is filmed from a subjective point of view, so that what Cléo experiences as the intruding gazes of the passers-by are highly present. She worries about being sick, losing her good looks, and thus the gazes remind her of the ambivalence of the kind of attention she is constantly the object of. These scenes remind the viewer of hir own perception and hir own conclusions: how do I view Cléo? What do I take her to be? What happens when I start to deride what she says as superstition? What do I perceive as masks, and what do I see as the 'real' Cléo? The dynamic and playful cinematic techniques employed in Cléo from 5 to 7 keep those questions at the heart of the film. One of those questions are, of course: what do I think happens in the last 30 minutes of 'Cléo from 5 to 7' that are not captured in the film, that runs at 1 hour, 30 minutes?