Cleo from 5 to 7 (The Criterion Collection)
by Agnès Varda
Our Price: $30.67
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Used: from $5.99 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Antoine Bourseiller, Corinne Marchand, Dominique Davray, Dorothée Blanck, Michel LegrandDirector: Agnès Varda
Cinematographer: Alain Levent
Cinematographer: Jean Rabier
Cinematographer: Paul Bonis
Writer: Agnès Varda
Editor: Janine Verneau
Producer: Carlo Ponti
Producer: Georges de Beauregard
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-05-16
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Cleo from 5 to 7 (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Freaks of the Underworld
Summary: 5 Stars
As Cleo stumbles through the streets of Paris, in shock over her prognosis, the ordinary sights and sounds of the streets attain a spectral radiance, in fact a disconnect from reality, that make her seem like the poor girl in CARNIVAL OF SOULS (played by the incomparable Candace Hilligoss). The two films, CLEO and CARNIVAL, were made right around the same time, 1962, otherwise it would be safe to say that Agnes Varda must have studied Herk Harvey's horror masterpiece for strategies on how to portray her heroine's gradual disintegration. Both films use subtle sound cues (as well as sound cues that hit you right over the head!) and both Hilligoss and Corinne Marchand play musicians (Michel Legrand's churning, relentless score is all over the place, Marchand mouthing several numbers). As Cleo traipses through the boulevards, she comes across some pretty freakish sights that have been little commented on when people speak of Cleo's "charm" and "wit," as if to prove that flaneurs don't necessarily enjoy a Maurice Chevalier experience of life, not when they're delirious and that elegant b/w photography goes all Weegee on a person. Cleo's trying to keep it together when she sees the man who swallows frogs--big live frogs, one after the other, as the camera stares at him, hypnotized as she is. He's shown as the peasant type, the guy from the countryside whose class is so low he has made himself into a freak for public consumption. You wonder how he gets so many of those frogs down, it's totally disgusting. Then he performs the money shot: tipping slightly at the waist, he evacuates them all in a solid spray of projectile vomit, white and greenish like the cold waves lapping at the fishermen's boots in Victor Hugo's TOILERS OF THE SEA. Cleo puts a fist over her own mouth and her eyelids flutter close. I haven't seen anything as freakish since season one of 30 Rock, the episode where Tracy Jordan is impersonating Star Jones on TGS with Tracy Jordan, stuffing his/her face with a thousand forbidden treats then throwing them all up like a vertical geyser across the studio kitchen, while Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin look on in what I now understand to be a subtle homage to Varda's nightmarish vision.
The other disturbing scene in CLEO occurs in a different neighborhood a few reels later, but Cleo's still reeling herself! There's a man running up to her proffering his bare forearm, through which he's worked what looks like two or three yards of waxed fishing line, which he pulls in and out of the suppurating flesh. It's like a burst of grand guignol still extant in the pop 1960s Cleo lives in, and again, she freaks out, -- anybody would. It's bad enough when you're walking around Paris and a flasher opens his raincoat, but these men are anticipating the body modification movement of the 1980s and it's uncanny.
Summary of Cleo from 5 to 7 (The Criterion Collection)
Agnes Varda, the lone woman in the French New Wave boys' club, made her reputation with her second feature Cleo from 5 to 7, a 90-minute drama set in real time exploring the internal turmoil of a flighty young pop singer who awaits the results of a medical examination for cancer. Leaving behind her elegant, almost antiseptic apartment for the bustle of the Parisian streets, she weaves through crowds and watches street performers while struggling with her fears and self-recriminations, confronting her shortcomings and finding hope in a chance meeting with a young soldier. Varda captures the vibrant social world and its easy rhythms in creamy black and white with smooth long takes, bringing an almost tactile quality to Cleo's personal odyssey, punctuated with chapter titles marking the time until her appointment at the hospital. Corinne Marchand's Cleo enters as a spoiled adolescent, but introspective internal monologues and brief encounters with strangers etch a portrait of a woman hiding her fears under a façade of flightiness, only discarding the mask when she firmly embraces life in the face of possible death. --Sean AxmakerSimilar DVD Movies
Amarcord (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2006-09-05; DVD
Best price: $19.99
Price in other shops:
Le Trou (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2001-10-16; Published: 2001-10-01; DVD
Best price: $21.99
Price in other shops:
The Complete Jean Vigo (À propos de Nice / Taris / Zéro de conduite / L'Atalante) (The Criterion Collection)IMG; Release date: 2011-08-30; DVD
Best price: $18.55
Price in other shops:
Vagabond (The Criterion Collection)Release date: 2000-05-16; DVD
Best price: $83.49
M (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2004-12-07; DVD
Best price: $20.74
Price in other shops:
Quai des Orfevres (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2003-05-27; DVD
Best price: $34.25
Contempt (The Criterion Collection)Release date: 2002-12-10; DVD
Best price: $17.99
Price in other shops:
Hiroshima Mon Amour (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2003-06-24; DVD
Best price: $22.00
Price in other shops:
The 400 Blows (The Criterion Collection)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2006-05-09; DVD
Best price: $17.63
Price in other shops:
Breathless (The Criterion Collection)IMG; Release date: 2007-10-23; DVD
Best price: $24.47
Price in other shops: