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Movies & TV

Cleo from 1962 to now

We’re still waiting on a Toronto release date for Agnes Varda’s delightful cinematic memoir The Beaches Of Agnes, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last fall … but this weekend, local audiences have a rare opportunity to catch Varda’s 1962 breakthrough, Cleo From 5 To 7, on a big screen. The Bloor Cinema will be showing the film, in a new 35mm restoration, from Saturday through Tuesday.

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A real-time drama about a singer (Corinne Marchand) wandering around Paris while waiting for the results of a biopsy, Cleo is one of those rare films that somehow feels untouched, and untouchable, nearly half a century after it was made.

The verite realism of the camera that follows Marchand through the streets, the navel-gazing subtext of a young woman weighing the possibility that her life is about to end except for the cars and the price of a cup of coffee, this could be a contemporary mumblecore production. Hell, even Cleo’s wardrobe has come back into fashion.

Thinking about it now, I’m actually shocked that the film hasn’t already spawned a series of ill-advised remakes – it provides an almost perfect template for low-budget melodrama, and the central role is so sympathetic that any actress would be a fool not to snap it up. I’m just saying, Kate Hudson might consider picking up the DVD she could use a project that makes her seem likeable, you know?

Not that Cleo From 5 To 7 actually needs to be remade, of course. Varda said everything there was to say – about fate, about mortality, about the unexpected ways in which people can connect to one another when they need to the most, and even about Paris – the first time out. You really ought to see this movie, even if it means braving the cold.

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