A Comfort Movie About Death

Cléo from 5 to 7

I saw Agnès Varda’s 1962 classic Cléo de 5 à 7 for the first time only last year, but it immediately entered my personal canon of favorites. Since then I’ve watched it a few more times: it was the kind of movie I immediately wanted to show to sympathetic friends and a movie I knew I could turn to when feeling sad or anxious or otherwise low. Last night I dreamed I had a cancerous tumor removed from my stomach; I took that as a portent that my plan to write about this movie was a good one.

Here’s the trailer. You can stream the whole movie on HBO Max (“Max”) or the Criterion Channel.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is a literal title, although fudged a bit for elegance: the story unfolds almost in real time, following the young, somewhat frivolous Cléo from a visit with a fortune-teller at 5 pm to her doctor’s appointment at 6:30. She’s waiting for the results of a medical test that might confirm she has stomach cancer. Her tarot reading is not reassuring, and all the bad cards come up: The Tower, The Hanged Man, and Death. The fortune-teller tries to soften the implications, but Cléo knows a bad reading when she sees one.

And what can she do, while waiting for her life-and-death news? She buys a hat, rehearses some songs, and receives a visit from her older, likely married lover (“men don’t like to hear about illnesses,” warns her assistant before they meet). She wanders the streets of Paris, runs an errand with her friend, watches a movie, takes a walk in the park, chats with a stranger, rides the bus. Sometimes she’s able to forget her fears, but something always reminds her. There are signs: broken mirrors, broken windows. Her superstition siezes upon them.

Cléo is young and beautiful, and with many of the characteristic faults of the young and beautiful: she’s vain, capricious, insecure, and takes the affection of her friends for granted. She’s at a promising moment in her career as a singer, with a new hit song on the radio. When her song comes on during her cab ride, she makes a show of protest, asking the cabbie to change the station, disparaging the singer, clearly hoping to be recognized. Then she admits with a smile that it’s her voice. She hasn’t quite fully matured into a grown woman, and isn’t always sympathetic — but it’s that immaturity that makes us see how much living she has ahead of her.

Over the course of the film we see a shift in her. At first, she’s wearing a blonde glamourpuss hairpiece and a polka-dot dress, admiring herself endlessly in a series of mirrors. Later, she ditches the hairpiece and puts on a more austere dress, and turns her gaze out to other people and the world. In one of my favorite scenes, near the midpoint, she walks into a busy cafe and puts her song on the jukebox, wanting to see how people react. They don’t notice — as she walks around the cafe, she hears snippets of lovers’ quarrels, mother-to-mother chats, and other quotidian things, bringing her back to the knowledge that to most people, her plight doesn’t matter at all.

Though the threat of sickness and death bookends the movie and is always hanging over it, Cléo’s hour and a half crackles with wit and life. Her apartment is inexplicably full of kittens, and we see them frolicking. She learns the names of trees. In the park, she performs an impromptu musical number while descending a staircase, like a little girl pretending to be a star. It’s like the cliché about the person receiving a death sentence who suddenly perceives all the beauty of the earth — but here it’s done with so much delicacy, and with so many small stabs of darkness, that it’s never twee or saccharine (except perhaps in a few moments in the final act, but those are forgiven). The ending cleverly manages to be both anticlimactic and a great shock to the soul.

It’s hard to explain why I find this movie so comforting, a balm for when I’m feeling troubled. Perhaps because Cléo is facing something very frightening, but in every moment it posits that life is precious, life is worth living, and we can be brave. Even that sounds like an overdone theme as I type it out. Perhaps it’s because we catch her, not confronting the Big Moment, but in these innocent interstitial hours after she’s drawn her cards but before she’s turned them over. Those hours between the plot beats of our lives are for contemplation, for comfort, for calling friends and taking walks in the park. I read in a novel (I can’t remember which one) a paragraph about trying to imagine, in one’s life, “the room before the pain” — some peaceful spot we occupied just before the blows came down. The room before the pain is a place to which we can never return, and for most of us, we didn’t know while we occupied it that it was a room before. But Cléo is given the gift of knowing: she can look at her own room before the pain, take it in, and understand.