One notable sequence in the film is Cléo’s walk from a café to her friends sculpting studio (Varda, 50:20-51:11). As she exists the café onto the Parisian street, lined with parked cars and shops with elaborate window displays, and walks past a group of young men, the camera follows behind her and captures the men’s stares— first at Cléo, then directly into the camera. Varda then uses editing to create an eyeline match in several following shots so that the camera, or the audience, sees what Cléo sees: another man staring directly into the camera as it moves further down the street and more reflective windows. The only sound that can be heard is Cléo’s heels clicking against the pavement as she struts. Next, the film cuts to a close-up of a street performer’s face as he gulps down a frog and winces. Although this is a flashback and not the current objective reality, the sound of Cléo’s heels still loom over the shot.
Now, the tension of the city picks up. The camera is situated in front of Cléo as she struts forward, stoically looking ahead, but unaware of the camera’s presence. Another eyeline match follows: first, an older woman walks past Cléo or the camera, glaring and eyeing her up and down. Another two women walk by and do the same, to which Cléo is seen fixing her hair in the following medium close-up shot. In the next series of shots, Varda collages together eyeline matches with flashback shots and the blurry in-between— shots in which it’s unclear if Cléo has seen the contents before, or if the content is only delivered to the audience by the grace of an unrestricted camera or its imagination. In all these shots, strangers of the imagination, pedestrians, and people in Cléo’s life and her past, such as Bob, her pianist, and her psychic, stare intently into the camera amidst the sound of Cléo’s heels before Cléo, too, is situated behind the camera again in a close-up shot. The sequence cuts to a shot of a clock in her loft and the sound of the clock ticking now joins the sound of Cléo’s heels during portrait-like shots of her boyfriend, Angèle, and Cléo’s wig hanging on her vanity. Finally, the sequence returns to the Parisian streets and Cléo is seen crossing the street amongst several pedestrians and cars.
The sequence is claustrophobic and unsettling by itself, but it’s particularly important in the context of the larger film because it prompts a significant shift in the role of the audience and forces the audience to assume the subjectivity of Cléo as an arguably vain, albeit beautiful woman. The use of editing to create eyeline matches transforms the experience of the audience, who not only is forced to look at Cléo throughout the film, but also becomes looked at as pedestrians and other characters glare directly into the camera, or at Cléo, or at us. The particular shots in which pedestrians, Bob, Angèle, Cléo’s boyfriend, and the psychic stare at the audience creates a relentless feeling of un-comfort that might just be the persistent reality for Cléo’s experience of womanhood and its accompanying sense of being exposed, naked to the gaze, and objectification.
Further, amidst the heightening tension created by the shots of intense stares, the sound of Cléo’s heels become rhythmic, creating a steady pace— a sense of control— against the randomness and unpredictability of the mise-en-scene, or the Parisian streets and its pedestrians, who will indeed look if they want to. It’s important to highlight, though, that despite the steadiness of the sound, it’s role in the sequence is quite chaotic; sometimes, the sound of Cléo’s heels is diegetic, such as in scenes of Cléo walking or shots of her perspective, but, at other times, the sound is non-diegetic, such as in flashback shots or the shot of her psychic glaring at the camera. Because the sound is constant and the audience is aware that, even in flashback shots, Cléo is still walking down the street, the sound of Cléo’s heels call attention to the film as a film— as something that can be edited so that what is seen and heard carefully constitute a constructed reality.
This attention to film through sound creates a serious tension between the subject of the camera and the mise-en-scene— between Cléo’s condition as a woman under the camera’s gaze (the film) and the reactions of very real pedestrians (the reality). There is a certain middle-ground, though: whether it’s film or reality, Cléo is always subject to being looked at— as an Other in film or an exotic and sexual figure in the outside world.
Thus, it can be said that the tension between film and reality also urges a feeling of not belonging as Cléo very clearly sticks out in terms of both shot composition and the reactions of pedestrians. The way Cléo interacts with the city and the mise-en-scene is not by active assimilation or synergy, but rather the interaction is incredibly one-sided with the city meticulously watching her as she moves throughout it. She is a perpetual foreigner to the city and her essence is pre-determined as an object only to be looked at and not understood or complicated by aspects other than her beauty and womanhood.
In addition to the sound of Cléo’s heels is the sound of the clock ticking. The shot of the clock interrupts the building claustrophobia caused by people looking directly at the camera or the audience. However, the shot of the clock does not provide the audience a moment of relief from Cléo’s subjectivity; it serves to tighten the claustrophobia and anxiety concerning Cléo’s possible illness as opposed to her beauty. The binary, here, between beauty and illness is interesting as they are theoretically in contrast and mutually exclusive, but I’d like to call attention to the sound of the clock in contrast to the sound of Cléo’s heels. Waiting on news from her doctor, Cléo is literally doomed to being a passive object to the film’s narrative, which is representative of the power she does not have in comparison to the male subject in film, who is able to actively progress the narrative (Mulvey, 488). Cléo must wait and not forward the story against her own will. Thus, the sound of the clock— the ticking that counts down the time towards Cléo’s release from passivity and ability to be in the know— reminds the audience of Cléo’s anxiety and passive subjecthood; just as she must wait, the audience must also hold the knot in their stomach for news on her illness until Cléo, herself, finds out.
As the clock ticks away, the sound of Cléo’s heels asserts itself in a battle for control— either possible illness or the insistence of her being. The simultaneous sounds, thus, forge a duality between Cléo’s existence as a human, susceptible to illness and death, and a woman or an object of looking always expected to be perfect. That is to say, as the clock’s ticking reminds the audience of possible illness and death, the opposite, life, is not much of a life at all as a woman under the gaze. This is compounded by the final shot of Cléo crossing the Parisian street, whose many cars and pedestrians are apathetic to Cléo’s anxiety, indicating that life goes on with or without Cléo’s presence.
Varda, in deliberately including “real” Parisian streets in the film, using editing to create eyeline matches and showcase Cléo’s perspective, and blurring the binary between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, is able to highlight the inescapable and invasive burden of Cléo’s to-be-looked-as-ness in both film and reality, which merge together in the sequence. Rather than allowing the audience an escape from both the scrutinizing gaze of pedestrians and the impending anxiety of mortal doom— rather than restoring the audience’s false sense of omnipotence—, Varda forces the audience to experience feminine subjectivity. Ultimately, in the sequence, the “female gaze” is employed literally, and it is revealed that reality, much like film, is latent with the male gaze, mortality, and the murky, but “real” in-betweens.
Works Cited
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film and Theory: An Anthology, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA, 2000, pp. 483–494.
Varda, Agnès, director. Cléo From 5 to 7. HBO Max, 1 Jan. 1961, https://play.hbomax.com/feature/urn:hbo:feature:GXnvVpgpMfYCgwwEAAA6I?source=googleHBOMAX&action=play. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.