Flâneuse

by Lauren Elkin

  That’s what gets me about all of her films. Varda’s images are dynamic, always in movement, even when the camera is resting. If La Pointe Courte seems rigid, even academic, because of the flat, detached way in which the actors were instructed to read their lines, visually the film is in an uproar over the manifold textures and patterns at large in the world. The same is true of Varda herself: even with her lens trained on one place, she can find, there, an infinity of other places. ‘I think people are made of the places not only where they’ve been raised, but that they’ve loved; I think environments inhabit us,’ she said in a 1961 interview. ‘By understanding people you understand places better, by understanding places you understand people better.’ In Cléo de 5 à 7, she would explore the force a neighbourhood exerts on Cléo, but not in a static way – rather, the way something inside Cléo herself shifts as she moves through the neighbourhood, as the neighbourhood moves through her.

  * * *

  The film was shot in 1961. That was the year of the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, the Shirelles’ ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, and Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’, a year when, in Hamburg, a group of four Liverpudlians were recording their first album. Dalida and Jean Ferrat topped the French charts. Yé-yé music was about to break through as the dominant sound of France in the sixties. At the cinema you could have gone to see Last Year at Marienbad, La Notte, Splendor in the Grass or West Side Story. Foucault published Madness and Civilisation, and Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth. De Gaulle was (still) in power, France’s economy was booming, and Algeria had been fighting for independence since 1954; they would finally get it the following year, in 1962. Varda is careful to contextualise Cléo’s story within these larger events; in one scene, in a taxi, Cléo hears on the radio that a group of French generals who tried to stage a coup d’état in Algeria have been found guilty, twenty people have been killed in a demonstration there, the farmers are protesting in Poitiers and the workers in Saint-Nazaire.

  Godard, Truffaut and company were inventing a cinematic vision of the streets of Paris that was modern and photogenic, yet also somehow nostalgic. But it was nostalgic for the present, above all; the fast cars and onslaught of advertising gave the impression that the world was moving so quickly that the present was always just moments behind the now, en décalage with itself. Godard’s producer wanted to capitalise on the success of Breathless the previous year by producing another film with a similar new-wave aesthetic. He wanted a director who, like Godard, could make Paris look good, a place where adventures could begin, and he wanted someone who could do it on the cheap. Godard suggested Varda, who proposed a relatively short film about a beautiful young woman, a singer with several hit singles to her name, who, while waiting for the results of a biopsy, walks apprehensively through Paris for two hours, eventually meeting a soldier about to leave for Algeria, who comforts her and puts her fears in perspective.

  To save money, Varda decided to film in a single day, the spring equinox in March 1961 – outclassing Godard by lending an Aristotelian unity to her production, as Paris changed from winter to spring. Alas it was not to be; the necessary financing could not be secured in time, so they decided to film on the summer solstice, 21 June: the longest day of the year. In the end, Varda didn’t regret it at all.

  The film takes place in thirteen chapters, as Cléo spends an afternoon walking through the incessant noise and grime and gossip of Paris, from five to seven in the evening (or more precisely from just before five until six thirty: Varda’s practical joke). In a neat symmetry, the thirteen chapters take Cléo from the 1st arrondissement at the beginning to the 13th at the end.

  ‘What did Paris represent for me?’ Varda wondered years later.

  A vague fear of the big city and its dangers, of losing myself there, lonely and misunderstood, indeed, shaken to my core. These are the provincial’s thoughts, of course, and mainly come from books. I remember this character in a book by Rilke, who seemed dislocated, I remember seeing old people, solitary people in the street, buskers doing strange things (piercing their arms, swallowing frogs). These small fears quickly conglomerated into the fear of cancer which, in the 60s, took root in everyone’s minds.

  In Cléo, Varda blends this ‘vague fear’ of the city with the concrete fear of death and mortality. Varda thought of the Northern Renaissance paintings of Baldung Grien, depicting beautiful women in the grip of horrific skeletons. Ageing, death and disease threaten the blonde, nubile bodies of his German models: the skeletons lay hands on their naked flesh, or tug ominously on their gossamer skirts and hair. To translate this mortal fear into cinematic form, Varda says, ‘I imagined a character walking in the city […] The fear of being mortally ill. Is beauty then no protection, not mirrors, not the way other people see us?’ She dreamt up a young singer called Cléo, short for Cléopâtre, though her real name (we learn much later) is Florence. A proto-yé-yé girl, Cléo is all teased blonde updo, saucer eyes, and totally unrealistic corseted figure. Varda calls Cléo a ‘cliché-woman: tall, beautiful, blonde, voluptuous’. Cliché, in French, means ‘photograph’.

  Varda has explained that the emotional thrust of the film is about Cléo’s journey from image to subject, the pivot from being ‘the object of the look’ to ‘the subject who looks’. The looks she receives at the beginning of the film shore her up, makes her feel beautiful, desirable, but she finds another kind of validation from within through an afternoon spent wandering in the city. Seeing the familiar sights of her neighbourhood with this new awareness of death and the impending decay of her beauty, Cléo sheds her synthetic self and finally reaches a state of calm self-awareness. The city refuses to let her wallow. It forces her gaze outward.

  As Cléo stops thinking of herself purely in terms of how others see her, the camera stops watching Cléo only from the exterior and begins to represent the world from her point of view. The film specifically challenges the idea that a woman could not walk the streets the way a man does, anonymously, taking in the spectacle; a woman is the spectacle, goes this argument. Looking, not simply appearing, signals the beginning of women’s freedom in the city.

  The real moments of agency in the film are when Cléo disappears from view: this is when she sees, instead of being seen. Varda herself takes this freedom a step (pardon the pun) further. It is Varda we imagine behind the camera, even if she is not the camera operator, Varda who determines where the camera will go, and when, and what it will capture. It is powerful to see the evolution of a flâneuse in front of the camera, but every step Cléo takes reminds us of the one behind the camera.

  Could the film take place elsewhere? In London? In Tokyo? Maybe, but it wouldn’t scan the same way. Paris is a city of mirrors. It’s full of them – in the foyers of buildings, on the streets, on the sides of buildings (or maybe they’re one-way windows that look like mirrors to passers-by. I imagine the people inside spend their whole day mocking the vain Parisians who nonchalantly cast a glance into the window-mirror as they walk by, which is exactly why I studiously avoid looking at myself in them, lest there be someone there to notice and judge). The city is so photogenic it almost doesn’t have a bad angle, and it’s always ready for its close-up. Even the people on the café terraces are mirrors of a kind, watching the people who walk by, reflecting on their faces their approval, or disapproval, or complete disinterest.2

  Cléo has no embarrassment whatsoever about stopping to admire herself in every mirror she sees, at least in the first half of the film. Even leaving the fortune-teller’s building, she stops to look in the mirror in the lobby, comforting herself that as long as she is beautiful, she is safe. ‘Being ugly, that’s what death is. As long as I’m beautiful, I’m ten times more alive than everyone else.’

  As she walks into the café we hear the switch from the street to the café, from the hum of engines to the chatter of voices. Cléo’s in a kind of daze, as if she doesn’t really see where she’s going. There she joins her governess/personal assi
stant Angèle, and she bursts into tears. Angèle removes Cléo’s belt and holds a hanky to her nose, calling her ma petite fille. They leave the café – drinks are on the house – and on the way home for a music rehearsal, Cléo spots a hat shop with a little furry cap in the window. She tries on half the hats in the shop, hats that must have looked absurd even to a 1960s audience. One sits like a starfish on her already starfish-like updo, one cascades over in feathery tentacles, one perches like Peter Pan’s. (Unmistakably Varda taking the piss out of women’s fashion.) ‘Tout me va,’ Cléo sighs, Everything suits me, and is comforted. We watch her from outside, through the shop window; the city is reflected on its surface, and in the shop mirrors, slowly moving from being a reflective surface for Cléo to a character in its own right, Cléo’s co-star.

  * * *

  Varda would have liked that the postman was willing to come and find me in a nearby café – very flexible, very small town of him. Ça fait très quartier. It’s exactly the way you’d like to think an idyllic Parisian neighbourhood should operate.

  They say that Paris is made up of a thousand villages. In fact, this is administratively true. Each arrondissement has its town hall, its local government; each micro-neighbourhood has its markets, its Monoprix, its Franprix, its post office, its branches of the major banks, its high street shops. But – and this may be a controversial opinion – each village is a lot like every other village in the city. The spiral layout of the post-Haussmannian arrondissements confirms this impression, as if the 1st arrondissement were the model for all the others as they spin outward from the centre, self-replicating until they hit the périphérique.

  But every neighbourhood has its own specific feeling, even if, superficially, they can all look alike. You know when you step out of your neighbourhood: you can feel it. I seem to recall Georges Perec writing of one of his walks around the city that he can sense the moment when one neighbourhood gives way to the next without consulting the blue-plated street signs, and that this sets apart the Parisian from the visitor. The Situationists noticed this as well: ‘The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.’3

  Things happen in your neighbourhood that don’t happen outside of it. There’s a sense of community; I may not know the people in my building, but I know the fruit guy, the wine guy, the woman at the post office, the people who run all the cafés within a five-minute radius (and there are at least four). I suppose this is the case in any neighbourhood in the world; I suppose this is the very definition of a neighbourhood. But when it happens in Paris, it feels special. Perhaps it’s because everyone is so bad-tempered all the time that the moments of civic harmony stand out and shimmer. Or maybe I feel this way because I’m an adopted Parisian, and love the city with the vehemence of the convert. But probably it’s because it makes me feel like this is home.

  Perec calls this ‘putting a mawkish face on necessity, a way of dressing up commercialism’, but then he never moved to a foreign country.4 It’s not mawkish when it’s a question of survival; you have to construct a community out of something. It’s when people make a gesture that goes beyond necessity that it becomes neighbourly, like the time the woman who lives downstairs came to my door with an uncooked quiche in her hands, asking to use my oven (hers had broken), which is maybe an urban French version of asking for a cup of sugar.

  Neighbourhoods are important to Varda. She’s a deeply Parisian director, though she’s originally from Belgium, and in 1977 she made a documentary about her street, the rue Daguerre, in the 14th arrondissement, called Daguerréotypes. The camera introduces us to the kinds of people who live and work there, the people who own the boulangerie, the accordion shop, the grocers, the butcher. Often we see them through the glass of their shop windows. Or Varda asks them to speak about their lives, what they do, where they’re from. She comments, in voice-over, ‘In the 14th everyone comes from somewhere else. Its sidewalks smell of the countryside.’

  One of the three exterior arrondissements of the Left Bank, the 14th is bordered on the south by the suburbs (Paris extra-muros), and on the west by the train tracks leading into the Gare Montparnasse. Dividing it from the rest of Paris along the north is the Boulevard Montparnasse, where cafés cluster by cinemas and crêpe stands, and which eventually becomes the stately Boulevard Port-Royal. To the east it is demarcated by the rue de la Santé, named after the notorious prison (where Jean Genet was once an inmate) that currently stands there, on the site that until the seventeenth century was occupied by a hospital, transferred in 1651 to the present-day location of the nearby Hôpital Sainte-Anne. There are stretches of the 14th, like the avenue de Maine, which seem to go on forever. The 14th borders the once shabby and now stylish 6th arrondissement, as well as the once shabby and now less shabby 13th, and the once shabby and now bourgeois 15th. And everywhere it is studded with hospitals – Cochin, where I had an operation once, Sainte-Anne, La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Joseph, too many to name. Even the prison is called the Santé (Health). As Cléo remarks towards the end of the film, standing on Boulevard de l’Hôpital in the 13th:

  CLÉO

  This neighbourhood is full of hospitals. As if one were better cared for in the 13th and 14th arrondissements …5

  Varda moved to the rue Daguerre in 1951, when Montparnasse was full of artists’ studios. She was a young photographer, and no doubt the reference to Louis Daguerre, inventor of an early form of photography, appealed to her. The living in her flat was extremely rough. For the first three years there was no heat, except for a coal stove, and no indoor toilet. There was no telephone, either; Varda had to trespass on the generosity of a nearby bistro to make and receive calls. But it included a little courtyard, and in time she took over the whole house, making it much more comfortable. Varda’s husband, the film-maker Jacques Demy, came to live there in 1958, and soon the house was their base of operations in Paris, the site of many a film shoot, and a haven for visiting friends. In the days before the Veil Law legalised abortion in 1975, Varda says she and Demy lent their home on two separate occasions to clandestine surgeries. She still lives in that same house; she’s even set up a shopfront where you can buy her films on DVD.

  Cléo lives in Montparnasse, too. When she and Angèle head for home in a taxi, she gives her address as 6 rue Huyghens, which on the north links the Boulevard Raspail, one of the main arteries of Montparnasse, with the cemetery on the south end. Their taxi driver is a woman, which fascinates them.

  CLÉO

  And at night, you aren’t afraid at night?

  TAXI DRIVER

  No, I’m not afraid of much.

  She says she got into an altercation once with a bunch of kids who didn’t want to pay their fare, but she chased them off. The driver is a flâneuse on wheels: she knows the city, she’s completely independent, and she knows how to defend herself.

  When the driver asks if it’s all right to put on the radio, Cléo replies, ‘Vous êtes chez vous’: she is at home in her taxi, at home everywhere she goes. She’s the first independent woman Cléo notices in the film. Angèle finds her inspiring and courageous. Cléo, not yet on her journey, doesn’t.

  In her long career, Varda has filmed her neighbourhood so many times that the late film critic Roger Ebert dubbed her ‘Saint Agnès of Montparnasse’. In the director’s commentary to her short film Le Lion Volatil, she addresses the camera with tarot cards hanging on the wall behind her, and as she speaks, she shuffles through an assortment of postcards. She displays one for the camera of the Lion of Belfort, the immense lion reposing in the centre of the roundabout at Denfert-Rochereau, a replica of the sandstone statue in Belfort, sculpted by Auguste Bartholdi to commemorate the Prussian siege of 1870–71 (which makes it the 14th arrondissement’s Statue of Liberty). In 1933, the city circulated a questionnaire: What could be done to the monuments of Paris to embellish them? André Breton replied: give the Lion de Belfort a bone to gnaw on and tu
rn him so he’s facing west. Varda does just this in the film, which is a love story about an apprentice fortune-teller and a mysterious man who works at the Catacombs. Turning a famous postcard lion a few degrees to the west is the kind of adjustment Varda adores.

  Varda frequently walks in front of the camera like this, either as narrator, subject or onlooker, except for one scene in The Beaches of Agnès where she’s dressed like a potato. She is physically memorable: short of stature and prominent of proboscis (an attribute we share). Her round eyes take in everything and her face wears an eternally knowing expression. But it’s her hair that most people notice. Since the late 1950s she’s had the same bowl-cut hairstyle, something between a medieval monk and Joan of Arc. It began dark, and as it greyed she dyed it a brilliant shade of aubergine. Halfway through The Beaches of Agnès, it becomes even more idiosyncratic: as the hair dye grows out, she leaves a round grey circle at the crown of her head, making her look even more like a monk, the kind that shaves his head at the crown and lets his hair grow on the sides.

  It’s a wonderful, almost punk use of hair dye not to disguise the onset of age or to attempt a different hair colour, but to highlight the artifice. It wouldn’t be going too far to suggest that her films do the same, combining elements of naturalist storytelling with documentary techniques, blending truth and fiction and pointing it out to the viewer. She refuses the constraints of story, shape, genre and hair colour.

  I didn’t choose the neighbourhood I lived in for many years, down the other end of Port-Royal. I moved there in order to be closer to a boyfriend, who lived in the rue Mouffetard. I spent most nights at his place and rented mine as a kind of office/storage facility, a place to put all my stuff while I waited for us to get a flat together. Then when he took a job in Tokyo and moved out of his flat, this became my primary residence in Paris, the place I would come home to when I wasn’t staying with him in Japan. At first it still felt like his neighbourhood, but as time went on I seemed to inherit it. After we broke up, it stayed my home. I lived there for eight years, longer than any place I’d ever lived, apart from the house I grew up in.