Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnés Varda, 1962, France/Italy)

A succesful French singer, Cléo (Corinne Marchand), wanders through the left bank of Paris, awaiting in anguish for result of a medical examination. She meets up with a young soldier, in who she finds uninspected intimacy and renewed hope. The movie runs in real time with genuine grace, generating, powerful emotions and showing slow breakdown of the leading character face.

Agnés who before making films was a widely travelled photographer. The film is more like a series of fluid whited-out photographs than organic structure. She uses technics from cinema vérite to produce a feeling of a documentary, where her anxious and depersonalized views of the world are depicted in these two hours of her life, while waiting for the doctors verdict.

The film dwells on feminism before it even existed, a womans fear of losing her beauty and also questioning of the truth of that beauty as the film progresses. This is well put in Molly Haskells essay on the film; “Varda paints an enduring portrait of a woman’s evolution from a shallow and superstitious child-woman to a person who can feel and express shock and anguish and finally empathy. In the process, the director adroitly uses the camera’s addiction to beautiful women’s faces to subtly question the consequences of that fascination—on us, on them.”