Currently, the sequence shot is being seen more and more as an exhibition to see who has it rolling the longest, losing part of the charm and narrative intentionality of this resource. The ability to immerse yourself in a character’s perspective, not to lose track of his actions, is one of the best things he can offer us. Although it is not the only way that a narrator can have to do that immersive job.
Even with the cuts and without that perfectly manufactured continuity, there are movies that you feel are putting you in another perspective and you don’t let go at any time. M. Night Shyamalan tries to play with that in ‘There’s a knock at the door’ from the prolonged tension. More risky but more successful is one of the essential jewels of the Nouvelle vague‘Cleo from 5 to 7‘, which does so by challenging conventional narrative forms but never fails to lose the emotional thread that the protagonist lives.
Waiting for news
This masterful film by Agnès Varda can be viewed for free via streaming on the Caixaforum+ website (you can also watch it if you subscribe to Filmin or Acontra+). It is included together with ‘Varda by Agnès’ as part of a special review carried out on the French filmmaker in this month of February. It is a great opportunity, and just to be able to see one of the best movies ever made.
Corinne Marchand She plays the title Cleo, a young singer who has just had a medical exam and is expecting the results in a couple of hours. In between, she goes to a tarot session in which the fortune teller looks at her cards and interprets that the singer may die of cancer. Although “letters can mean many things,” her session leaves her completely distraught and begins to consider his own mortality.
With a detail as simple but as effective as changing the color of the tarot session to black and white when she shows her reaction, Varda begins an interesting journey on fragility of this young woman who begins to have death present. Something that connects with the director herself, who seems to explore mortality (from that of those she shoots around her, like her husband Jacques Demy, or even herself) from the beginning of her work to her last works. .
But he does not explore it from fatalism, but as an opportunity to observe the world around him with different eyes, the people he comes across and they show very interesting lives. Varda is associated with the Nouvelle Vague movement by generation and for the transgressive style with which she shoots and rides, especially in this film. However, unlike her peers who were film scholars and her critical ways, Agnès raises cinema as an extension of his origins as a photojournalist. That a good part of his career has been made up of documentaries is no coincidence.
Varda raises both fiction and non-fiction in the same way, using the image capture methods provided by cinema as a window into other people’s lives. Lives worth watching and listening to, because you never know what they might reveal to you. The Cleo in the film is making this same journey through her inner gaze that she begins to project outwards. She begins by considering the way the world sees her and ends by enriching herself with those people she comes across.
‘Cleo from 5 to 7’: emotional continuity
All told with cinematographic forms that still feel totally fresh sixty years later. The moments that she creates from any smallest detail, from the music to the editing, make ‘Cleo from 5 to 7’ continue to feel alive. Something to which the viewer also contributes, who depending on her vital moment can find different things in Cleo’s journey that resonate in a special way.
That magical quality maintains it as an essential work. Varda always maintains a fascinating emotional continuity throughout the ninety minutes that does not lead you to question that the two hours that she is dedicating to waiting for the results are passing. All with the beautiful empathic quality that she has maintained throughout her career, which makes her fictions indistinguishable from documentaries because it seems that is always watching peopleand that led him to function completely independently of the nouvelle vague.
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