Cleo from 5 to 7

Vanity and the absurd nature of voyeurism and spectacle find themselves at the center of this film, though it becomes apparent in the end to be making very strongly a statement on the process of personal transition and growth. The beautiful yet vain and self-pitying jazz singer Cleo anxiously awaits biopsy results, and we follow her through the two hours preceding her reception of these results. At first, we are presented with a character who is self-absorbed and vain, but also anxious. As we follow her through the city in the initial stages of the film, we see her admiring herself in the mirror, being the object of men’s glances in the street, and shopping for clothes. Eventually, she returns to her apartment, where her boyfriend visits her. This visit is strange, and furthers the notion of Cleo as an object of beauty to be uplifted and beheld, rather than a human being—the conversation between the two consists mainly of him speaking in superlatives of her beauty and her status as a woman, and her happily accepting them, almost as a reinforcement to her self-perceived perfection, which seems to be dwindling as the results of the biopsy draw nearer. Once he has left, Cleo’s songwriters arrive, and a very impacting and affecting scene takes place, both for the viewer and for Cleo. The piano player begins to play a sort of dark melody, and Cleo sings a melancholy song which seems to be inextricably connected to her present state and situation. Once the song is over, she rushes to change her clothes. Her outfit is now one of a mourner dressed in black, and she leaves the apartment. This moment, beyond any other in the film, is the crux of the film. She has transformed—humility and humanity and, ironically, life have become her. She goes back to wandering the city, meets her friend, who is a nude model for a sculpting class and who is very comfortable with herself and her body, but is not vain, and who thus becomes a sort of counterpart to Cleo’s vain self. Cleo, from there wanders to a park and meets a soldier on leave. The two form quite quickly a close connection, and he accompanies her to the hospital to get her results. As it turns out, Cleo in fact does have cancer, and this, like so many other things in this film, stands ironically in contradiction to the character with whom we are presented at the beginning of the film—the perfect beauty. This kind of irony and contradiction was prevalent throughout the film and was fantastic: a number of times, the beautiful figure of Cleo walking the street is set against the image of street performers making of spectacle of themselves doing bizarre and even disgusting things for the crowd surrounding them, and also, of course, the cancer itself is terribly ironic. However, the strangest and most effective of them all is Cleo’s expression of happiness after she has received the news of her cancer.