By Elena Basati,
Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) is a masterwork of the French New Wave movement, standing out not only for its cinematic innovation but also for its feminist take on objectification and body politics. This perspective is especially important given the social context of the period, when women were often seen as unequal to men or merely as objects of desire.
Set in Paris in the early sixties, the story unfolds in real time, as the title suggests. The film follows a young singer, Cléo, as she wanders through the streets of the French capital, waiting for the results of a biopsy test. At first, the film gives the impression that the protagonist is trying to kill time and distract herself. However, as the story progresses, it delves into deeper themes: the objectification of women and the looming threat of losing beauty and youth in the face of illness.
The French New Wave was revolutionary in many ways, but directors like Goddard and Truffault often reinforced traditional gender roles, with their films largely shaped by the male gaze—a concept articulated by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essayVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, where she argues that in traditional cinema, female characters are passive while male ones are active.Varda, however, resists this narrative style and allows her protagonist to evolve and exhibit agency.
In the beginning, Cléo is immersed in her own objectification—obsessed with her beauty, highly dependent on male validation, and self-alienated. As the story unfolds, though Cléo begins to see herself as a subject, rather than an object observed by men. This subtle shift can be seen as a feminist act of reclaiming authority.
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity asserts that gender is not biological or innate but a social structure, performed through repetitive acts that conform to societal expectations. This is evident in the film, as Cléo is a textbook example of performative femininity—when we meet her, she is playing the role of the fragile, beautiful woman dressed in white, adored and infantilized by men. Yet over the course of the film, we witness Cléo escaping this role and shedding the performative armor. Specifically, in a symbolling act of self-reclamation, she takes off her wig and walks through the streets of Paris, unafraid to be seen.
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) is praised for its real-time structure, fluid camera work, and poetic attention to space and time. Varda, one of the few female directors in a movement dominated by men, injects feminist consciousness into a narrative that had previously been predominantly male-centered. More importantly, Varda gives voice to a woman in limbo—not just in time, but in identity—addressing issues of feminism and the search for selfhood in an era where nothing was taken for granted.
References
- Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). Internet Archive. Available here
- Womanhood in French Film “Cleo From 5 To 7”. The Gazelle. Available here
