I substantially agree with Matt Bailey’s review, so I’m just going to add a few notes:
It’s been said of so many movies that “Paris is the star,” but here it’s more as if Paris were the director. Varda frequently shoots through car windshields, giving us long takes of incidental observation of traffic, shop windows, art students running amok, more traffic. This makes me realize how comparatively controlled some of the famously vivacious, spontaneous New Wave directors (Godard, Truffaut) are when they shoot the city; or rather, they’ve often eliminated anything that will fail to give the effect of spontaneity. For instance, the sheer number of old people out on the streets in Cléo, particularly old women, is striking.
A related point: Varda’s use of dead space between “movie scenes.” Cléo’s style is mostly semi-documentary but every once in a while will rev itself up into Sirkian melodrama (its heroine is, after all, a “mélomaniac”) or romantic comedy. The real-time gambit justifies itself here: it’s as if we’re seeing everything that leads up to an especially charged moment. In a way this trick has since become familiar, though significantly it’s usually subsumed within a broader metacinematic technique, so that we see the scene being arranged before it’s allowed to play out; it’s as if we’re being asked to say, “Oh, how artificial.” But Varda just shifts from ennui into rapture without signaling. The sweetness of this is in its casual suggestion that such magic moments do happen, even, as it were, spontaneously; you just have to wait around for them a while.
Cléo’s relation to Lola, made the previous year by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy. The titles seem to play off each other, and both in their way consider feminine narcissism. Both feature musical sequences (or rather, rehearsals for musical sequences). Both have a just-looking-around innocence of style that contrasts with their protagonists’ protestations of despair, as if their directors were kids watching their older siblings go through a rough period.
by Evan Kindley | Source: Criterion Collection DVD
10 Jul 2008 2:30 PM | Submit Comment