On Location: The final shot from Agnés Varda’s… | Little White Lies

On Location

On Loca­tion: The final shot from Agnés Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7

30 Jun 2019

Words by Adam Scovell

A black-and-white image showing two people walking in a courtyard setting with a large, ornate building in the background and trees lining the courtyard.
A black-and-white image showing two people walking in a courtyard setting with a large, ornate building in the background and trees lining the courtyard.
Paris’ Boule­vard de l’Hôpital pro­vides the set­ting for one of the most cher­ished end­ings in French cinema.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is a wan­der­ing film, a melan­cholic city odyssey through Parisian streets. In her sec­ond fea­ture, Agnès Var­da shows her under­stand­ing of Paris to be bet­ter than most of her equal­ly cos­mopoli­tan con­tem­po­raries, film­ing a jour­ney through some of the capital’s most pic­turesque and unique urban land­scapes. Shoot­ing in the streets and build­ings of the Left Bank, Var­da achieved a lev­el of authen­tic­i­ty that is dif­fi­cult to match. With such authen­tic­i­ty comes a mul­ti­tude of pos­si­ble plea­sures for the film loca­tion enthu­si­ast, with almost every frame of the film pre­sent­ing a poten­tial vis­it or wander.

Varda’s film fol­lows a day, or more pre­cise­ly two hours, in the life of Cléo (Corinne Marc­hand), a famous singer plagued by para­noia over an impend­ing biop­sy result. Her wor­ry dri­ves her to wan­der and explore Paris, some­times for­get­ting her prob­lems via friends and chance meet­ings, some­times over­come with anx­i­ety over what a poten­tial ill­ness could mean to her as a singer and as a woman. Cléo is, on this day, forced live with chance rather than the accus­tomed con­trol over which she is clear­ly used to exert­ing. Varda’s film is essen­tial­ly an anx­i­ety map of its lead char­ac­ter, in which the long way round is tak­en to get a sim­ple answer.

As much as being a nar­ra­tive film, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a car­to­graph­ic doc­u­ment. The strength of the film comes from the verac­i­ty with which Var­da cap­tures the jour­ney at the film’s core. Paris is not frag­ment­ed but almost recre­at­ed from real­i­ty, show­cas­ing gen­uine haunts and realms from the period’s art scene in a way only some­one total­ly immersed in it could have known. Being shot in this way, and with the screen filled almost con­stant­ly with images of Parisian walk­ways, build­ings and streets, a full walk of the film is entire­ly pos­si­ble, so long as its occa­sion­al taxi jour­ney and bus ride is tak­en into account. Whether we would see the same city as Cléo does with her new­ly acquired, mor­bid gaze, how­ev­er, is anoth­er question.

With so many poten­tial loca­tions to choose to vis­it, it was a dif­fi­cult choice to find one that sum­maris­es the whole film: how can a film explic­it­ly about jour­ney­ing be con­tained with­in one image? The clos­est answer I found was in a scene in the film’s finale, in which the thoughts haunt­ing the film come to a strange, cor­po­re­al anti-cli­max in the wit­ti­est of Var­da-esque visu­als. Cléo, along with the local sol­dier (Antoine Bour­seiller) she has picked up as a wan­der­ing com­pan­ion, final­ly go to the hos­pi­tal to get her results.

They meet the doc­tor (Robert Postec) dri­ving along the road just in time, casu­al­ly giv­ing the diag­no­sis out of the win­dow before depart­ing, leav­ing the pair star­ing in amaze­ment. But what are they watch­ing as the shot moves off with the cam­era: their fears drift­ing away, the waste of time of the last two hours, the hope of a city seen anew?

Ornate archway leading to a courtyard, surrounded by historic multi-storey buildings with decorative facades and dormer windows.

The shot in ques­tion, in which Var­da quite lit­er­al­ly dri­ves the cam­era away from the pair, is one of the arch­ing, cob­bled roads out­side of the Cours Saint-Louis, the road lead­ing to the famous l’Hôpital Uni­ver­si­taire Pitié-Salpêtrière. Though orig­i­nal­ly start­ing out as a fac­to­ry for gun­pow­der, it became a hos­pice for poor women, and in par­tic­u­lar a prison for pros­ti­tutes. The build­ing is equal­ly famed for its Catholic chapel, the St Louis Chapel of the Salpêtrière com­mis­sioned by Louis XIV and designed by the archi­tect of Les Invalides.

Now one of Paris’ most suc­cess­ful teach­ing hos­pi­tals, Cléo was in fine com­pa­ny in being one of its atten­dees. Michael Fou­cault and Lady Diana died there, whilst the hos­pi­tal is gen­er­al­ly known for its famous patients includ­ing Alain Delon and Gérard Depardieu.

The loca­tion is inter­est­ing in the film as it real­ly is its end­point. Even if the film went on wan­der­ing, which would be an equal­ly Var­da-esque thing to do, this would still be turn­ing point, the peak. For the mean­der we’ve seen through­out the whole film has been an avoid­ance of this place and what it rep­re­sents for the char­ac­ter. This loca­tion has coloured the film emo­tion­al­ly, iron­i­cal­ly drag­ging it into black-and-white.

When Var­da zooms that cam­era shot away in the doctor’s car, it is a telling ges­ture; a nod to the para­noia of the film but also an acknowl­edge­ment of its serendip­i­ty, the joy of a jour­ney unplanned. As Lau­ren Elkin observes in her beau­ti­ful assess­ment of the film in her book Flâneuse’, The car pulls away and the cam­era with it: Cléo’s shock ren­dered in move­ment, a quick back zoom trav­el­ling. Trav­el­ling shots for a trav­el­ling director.”

The film was shot on the spring equinox of 1961 and was cer­tain­ly a nicer day than my win­tery vis­it. Walk­ing along Boule­vard de l’Hôpital and try­ing to avoid the street sweep­ing cars which dri­ve at unusu­al­ly fast speeds along the pave­ments, I even­tu­al­ly came to the gates of the hos­pi­tal. The rail­way line from the Gare D’Austerlitz runs on a raised line along the road, under which a small shan­ty town of tents hud­dle under­neath shel­ter­ing from the rain. A friend­ly secu­ri­ty guard greet­ed me as I worked out which of the two roads Cléo and her sol­dier wan­der back on.

In 1961, Cléo could not have been in a bet­ter place to receive her med­ical news, of hope for heal­ing. This neigh­bour­hood,” she says, is full of hos­pi­tals. As if one were bet­ter cared for in the 13th and 14th arrondisse­ments.” The state­ment has a stark irony today con­sid­er­ing the oth­er vagrant wan­der­ers tak­ing shel­ter just over the road, left to walk with no end in sight.

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