What follows is an hour and a half of similarly surprising images as we follow Cleo about the Left Bank of Paris as she awaits the results of a biopsy across a ninety minute period almost in real time. We discover that she's a singer who's accepted that much of her perceived talent is derived from her looks, yet we can't help wondering if her beauty and mostly superficial personality aren't a bridgehead to something deeper.
The film slips as Adrian Martin notes at Criterion between fiction and a documentary record of Varda's home during an uncertain period:
"... it is as jazzily photographed and busily edited as any more conventional narrative film. Rather, Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction. Unlike traditional story films, which skip everywhere in both time and space, Varda gives us a gauntlet: every second piling up, every step traced out. And she picked the best possible site for this gauntlet walk: the Left Bank of Paris is preserved for us in all its early sixties vibrancy and diversity. Indeed, Varda once described the film as “the portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris.”One of the greats which I've been saving for quite some time but watched tonight to cheer myself up at the tail end of a cold/man-flu, its influence has seeped directly and indirectly into dozens of other films in the half century since release so much so that our sight-seeing not just the geography of Paris, but the history of cinema.
I can now see that Richard Linklater directly references it in both of the Before Sunsomething films (particularly the final fifteen minute love affair and indeterminate conclusion) and how the so-called modern Mtv shooting and editing style of Bay and Greengrass can be found in the car scenes here - except in this case, Cleo isn't chasing some generic villain carrying a mcguffin but her own destiny.
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