Regularly updated blog charting the most important films of the last 104 years.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
383. Cléo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7) (1962)
Directed By Agnes Varda
Synopsis
The film follows two hours of a pop-star's life, while she waits for some biopsy results which will tell her whether she has cancer.
Review
Agnes Varda is one of the great, if not the greatest female director of the French New Wave. In a film style that is kind of defined by the misogyny of Godard, it makes it quite fresh.
Varda was married to Jacques Demy, and that shows through in this film, there are similarities throughout with Demy's Lola, not only due to the central character being a beautiful and troubled woman, but in a certain lightness of touch absent from the dourer films of Godard. The importance of music is another thing that connects Lola and Cleo.
That being said while Lola is a film seen very much through a man's eyes, Cleo is a much more female-centred film, which is very much not to be confused with it being a "chick-flick". The way the film develops almost in real time is a really interesting exercise, as is the shifts in perspective from one character to the next, all of the shifts being signalled through subtitles in the film. Cleo is a slightly annoying character, but one who slowly improves as her priorities in life shift throughout the film and by the end you can see her on a path going beyond superficiality. Good film.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film includes cameos by Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine and Jean-Claude Brialy as characters in the silent film Raoul shows Cleo and Dorothee, while composer Michel Legrand, who wrote the film's score, plays "Bob the pianist". It was entered into the 1962 Cannes Film Festival.
Directed By Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi
Synopsis
The film shows several shocking or absurd scenes from around the world in a "documentary" style.
Review
Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction Mondo Cane is a really hard film to make up your mind about. Is it simply a commentary on the voyeurism of documentary cinema? Is it a slightly racist shock-fest? Is it an exercise on the idea of documental truth?
Well you can take it as you like, but it is definitely a powerful film which not only makes you feel depressed about human nature but also manipulates the viewer in their most basic feelings, and which is at the same time admirable and disgusting. In purely technical terms it is extremely well filmed and some close ups of faces are almost prefiguring later Italian film-makers such as Sergio Leone, seeing faces as ugly landscapes.
The film is extremely nihilistic in its outlook, while at times there might be a sense of some racism inherent in the exoticisation of the foreign as with the Papua New Guinea scenes, the film seems to be an equal-opportunity offender as European and American people are equally mocked and treated with paternalistic condescension. Of course most of the things in the film aren't really real, or are at least puffed-up versions of what is actually happening in order to serve the film's purpose. The lack of context in most scenes helps the film's end of portraying humanity as beyond the pale, but is ultimately unfair. If this is a commentary on the limits of documentary film-making it is indeed a poignant criticism, if not it shows dishonesty, but it is in any way a truly enlightening film.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
As well as encouraging sequels, Mondo Cane's shock-exploitation-documentary-exquisite corpse style is credited with starting a whole genre: the Mondo film. Examples of mondo film include Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Daytona, Mondo Mod, Mondo Infame and Mondo Hollywood; later examples include the Faces of Death series.
