Cleo 5 To 7 Analysis

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Cleo from 5 to 7 is a French New Wave film by Agnes Varda which tells the story of a young pop singer named Cleo who, on the longest day of the year, has two hours to wait until the results of her biopsy come back. At the beginning of the film, Cleo goes to a Tarot card reading which—she assumes—predicts her demise. Though the film is a new wave film, most of which tend to be extremely image conscious, I think the underling existentialist theme that is present in the movie is, in a way, satirizing the shallower side of the film movement and of pop culture. When Cleo is told at the beginning of the movie by the tarot card reader that she will experience a “profound transformation of her being” Cleo is quick to assume this means death and disfigurement. She leaves the reader and looks at herself in a mirror, exclaiming …show more content…

Janice Mouton mentions in her piece a 1929 study conducted by Joan Riviere about the “feminine masquerade.” In which many women of the time—and likely of Cleo’s time—felt their femininity to be an accessory, a mask they lived in rather than who they were. Something made just to appeal to men. I think that is a big statement being made throughout Cleo as well. When she is visited by a gentleman caller whom she is having some kind of affair with (though we are never quite clear on what kind it is), her friend warns her not to tell him she is ill because “men hate illness.” I think Varda was drawing on the way culture viewed femininity. Men were not in love with women as people, they were just in love with the idea of a woman and what they thought a woman should be. Women, it was felt, were to be other-worldly, angelic creatures. They could not experience death, disease, and illness the same way as men do simply because it was no glamorous

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