Cleo from 5 to 7 secures Agnes Varda’s place at the heart of the French New Wave

In a different, less oppressively patriarchal world, Clarisse Loughrey writes, film students would be as familiar with the film as ‘Breathless’ or ‘The 400 Blows’

The film follows singer Cleo (Corinne Marchand) in real-time as she awaits the results of a medical test (Cine Vog Films)

Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnes Varda’s spirited French New Wave classic, imagines Paris as a house of mirrors. One always ends up faced with their own reflection – in shop windows, tiled cafe walls, or hat shop looking-glasses. Strangers exchange glances, only to see themselves imaged in each other’s curious expressions. A young woman wanders the city, contemplating her own mortality. We look at her. She gazes at herself in the mirror. Her reflection looks back at us. Others notice her presence, but rarely see her as she is. Beauty has made her body visible, but not her soul.

Varda has long been called the grandmother of the French New Wave. But the title is insufficient – she was its heart, since she understood best the power of a camera’s gaze. While her male compatriots (and they were almost all male) were often critics and academics, she arrived on the scene a photographer. Cleo from 5 to 7 is not only exquisitely composed, but understands intimately the art of looking – how women, specifically, are created and destroyed in the eyes of others.

Much of the modern narrative around Varda has focused on her relative marginalisation in the annals of history. There’s no doubt that in a different, less oppressively patriarchal world, film students would be as familiar with Cleo from 5 to 7 than they would be Breathless or The 400 Blows. Only in the last decade has her place at the centre of the New Wave movement been formally recognised – in 2017, she won the honourary Oscar, two years before her death.