Anniversary of Cleo from 5 to 7
On April 11, 1962, Agnès Varda's film "Cleo from 5 to 7" was released in French cinemas. This film was the second feature film in the creative biography of the 34-year-old representative of the French "New Wave" Agnès Varda. She also acted as the author of the script for this film, which, in the style of a documentary, describes an hour and a half from the life of a young singer who is awaiting the results of an examination for a suspected oncological disease.
A month after the premiere, the film was presented at the Cannes International Film Festival, where it received a nomination for the main prize - the Palme d'Or. Agnes Varda did not receive this award - it was awarded by a jury chaired by the Japanese poet and diplomat Tetsuro Furukaki to the Brazilian film "O Pagador de Promessas (The Given Word)" directed by Anselmo Duarte. But Agnès Varda's film turned out to be in a more than worthy company of "relative losers", which, in particular, included the Italian films "Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce Italian Style)" by Pietro Germi and "L'Eclisse (Eclipse)" by Michelangelo Antonioni, the Soviet film "Когда деревья были большими (When the Trees Were Tall)" directed by Lev Kulidzhanov, American film "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Sidney Lumet and others.
Agnès Varda's film had no other festival successes, and this was bitterly noted in his review by the very authoritative American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who specializes in films that are usually referred to as arthouse:
"Beautifully shot and realized, this film offers an irreplaceable time capsule of Paris, and fans of Michel Legrand won’t want to miss the extended sequence in which he visits the heroine and rehearses with her. The film’s approximations of real time are exactly that—the total running time is 90 minutes—but innovative and thrilling nonetheless. Underrated when it came out and unjustly neglected since, it’s not only the major French New Wave film made by a woman, but a key work of that exciting period—moving, lyrical, and mysterious."
Rosenbaum was not the only film critic who praised Agnes Varda's film. The website rottentomatoes.com estimates that 92% of the film's reviews are positive. American film critic guru Roger Ebert gave the film a maximum of 4 stars and included it in his "Great Movies" list.
However, Bosley Crowther, the ever-peevish film reviewer of The New York Times, did not weave his voice into the chorus of positive characteristics of the film. In his review, he did not fail, as usual, to let a few pins in the address of Agnes Varda's picture:
"Objectively, it might be favored as a fair example of the slick techniques of the French New Wave. ... the film indicates at the outset that it is going to be a thing of fleeting moods, of casual illustration of the vagrant and fragile anxieties of a shallow girl....But, generally, Mlle. Varda is so absorbed with her camera stunts, as she is in that scene in the hat shop or when she is screening that comedy short, that the essential concentration on the heroine is neglected and the interest lost. The character becomes incidental to the techniques by which it is being explained. Also, Corinne Marchand, the actress who plays the central role, is a large, ponderous blonde with an enameled and generally inexpressive face. All she conveys is the dullness of a mechanically motivated girl—which, of course, causes one to be so-whatish about the intimated threat of her doom."
However, in the BBC's list of the 100 best films of world cinema created by women directors Agnès Varda's film "Cleo from 5 to 7" took second place, behind only the film "The Piano" by Jane Campion.
The aforementioned Jonathan Rosenbaum not accidentally noted in his review the underestimation of the movie by Agnès Varda. Indeed, even in France, in the first year of the demonstration of this film, only 7.4 thousand moviegoers watched it. In the US, the film grossed only $1,886. In the Soviet Union, the film was not shown at all, which, in general, is not something out of the ordinary.
But the modern moviegoer, after several decades after premiere, rated the film "Cleo from 5 to 7" quite highly. 66% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Agnès Varda's film "Cleo from 5 to 7" according to FilmGourmand version was 7,873, thanks to which it entered the Golden Thousand, in which ranked 887th.
