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It opens with hands in sinister color, it could be one of Corman's Poe films except that it's a young Parisienne at a worrisome Tarot session on the longest day of the year. (The card-reader whispers her verdict to a cohort, "elle est perdue.") A doll cracked by the awareness of mortality, "not a goddess, an idea," the pop singer (Corinne Marchand) nervously awaiting medical results, Cléo, short for Cléopatra. "Everybody spoils me. Nobody loves me." Shopping for Manet's black hat is one way to pass the time, she and her salty assistant (Dominique Davray) dart like Marilyn Monroe and Thelma Ritter. A busy boudoir, "l'amant du moment" (José Luis de Vilallonga) drops by, so do vaudeville tunesmiths (Michel Legrand and Serge Korber) out of Ophüls' The Company's in Love. They rehearse a chanson and the objective turns subjective with a movement of the camera, the lens that is the heroine's mirror returns later as a bullet-shattered window. "Today, everything surprises me." A breeze of reflections and sensations, nothing but the clear sparkle of lived life for Agnès Varda, death's shadow faced with most ebullient eyes. Whizzing views of the city during a ride with a rugged female cabbie, Algeria and Kennedy and Khrushchev and Piaf on the radio. Hungering for some recognition, the chanteuse picks one of her own songs at the café jukebox and is disappointed with the distracted patrons, whose table-hopping chatter is just ahead of Losey's The Servant. Flesh amid plaster, the model (Dorothée Blanck) comfortable at the atelier. "Nudity should be for everyone, like summer." Pit stop at the movie house for Jean-Luc Godard's Harold Lloyd side, to the end of the line aboard Murnau's trolley with the soldier on leave (Antoine Bourseiller). Four decades later Varda answers her anxiety here with the serenity of The Gleaners and I, where constant real-time intertitles hearteningly give way to "a clock without hands." Cinematography by Jean Rabier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |