by Lauren Elkin
It’s strange the places we end up wedging ourselves. What does our neighbourhood say about us? What is the value of a neighbourhood? Mine is a mirror of my past choices. Pick your path and see where it goes. Pick a subject and see where it leads. Most assuredly you won’t be able to predict anything along the way. This is Varda’s version of cinematic flânerie. In spite of her well-feathered nest in the rue Daguerre, Varda is a vagabonding sort of person, and a vagabonding sort of director; she’s tracked her subjects from Los Angeles to Cuba to Iran, filming hippies, Warhol muses, Black Panthers, Communist revolutionaries and feminist folk singers. Even her very latest film, a short called Les Trois boutons, shows a young girl flâneuse-ing her way down the rue Daguerre in Paris, buttons falling off her dress, creating the life she wants to live. Perennially open to inspiration by objects as well as people, Varda shows herself, in Les plages d’Agnès, hunting through the brocantes of Paris. ‘I love flea markets,’ she tells the camera. You never know what you’ll find there, or how they’ll alter the course of your project. In 2000 she made a documentary about the age-old occupation of gathering food from what is left on the ground after the harvest, called Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I).
I call her a flâneuse. She calls herself a glaneuse.
Her curiosity guides her; she follows whatever clues are laid down in front of her, so that her films, especially the documentaries, are often collections of observations and serendipitous encounters. In Les plages d’Agnès, she goes to visit her childhood home in Brussels, which is now owned by a couple she’s never met. She wants to see where her bed was and those of her sisters, but the husband, a man about to retire and move to the countryside, just wants to show her his train collection. She accordingly films the man proudly showing off all of the different trains – the milk train, the post train, the passenger train. It’s worth two million Belgian francs, he says, identifying himself as an amateur lover of trains, a férrovipathe – an invented term which can best be rendered in English as ‘trainophile’. Varda hoots behind her camera, and repeats the term, amused by the turn of events: she went looking for her childhood, and instead found a model-train collector. This leads to reflections on other kinds of trains, other journeys, forced rather than nostalgic ones; her family left Brussels ‘amid the rumbling of bombs and ambulances’ when Agnès was almost twelve. The train-loving man living in her childhood home wasn’t on the itinerary, and yet he became the itinerary.
* * *
And so we get in the taxi with Cléo, picking up bits and pieces of Paris from the back seat, snatches of the river, the bridges, the churches, the park. As the car stops at lights, Cléo is confronted twice with African masks in the windows of Saint-Germain art galleries. The car is surrounded by students from the Beaux-Arts (where Varda studied) wearing masks, celebrating 21 June with some kind of wild ritual that involves shaking the car, banging on the windows. Cléo is getting jittery and carsick, as if every bump, every jostle of the car is shaking loose something inside of her that she has worked very hard to secure. They pull up to the corner of Boulevard Raspail and rue Huyghens and Cléo is home, walking through a courtyard to a free-standing building housing a très Montparnasse loft (in real life the studio at this address was the home of Emile Lejeune, painter and friend to the avant-garde musicians of the group Les Six). Why do they come home in the middle of the film? I wonder. Why not start at home and voyage out?
Her studio looks like an enchanted room out of a fairy tale, completely at odds with the modern city outside. Everything is white; there is a four-poster bed in the corner; kittens run and trip across the area rug.
CLÉO
I’m suffocating
she says when she walks in the door, stripping down to her slip. Her lover, José, comes to visit. Inserting herself into a relationship, however low-commitment on his end (does he have a wife? I wouldn’t be surprised), has the effect of narrowing her life inward, and the whole film constricts down to the bed where she receives him. This seems purposeful on Varda’s part, not just a reference to Cléo as a courtesan, whose business arrangements are carried out from the bedroom, but rather to show the way seeing herself as José’s doll keeps her immobile.
Her composer, Bob, has her sing the new song he’s written for her, and the thing inside of Cléo that has been threatening to drop finally does. The song is beautiful, haunting, the kind of masterpiece typical of Legrand, subsequently so famous for his score to Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).6 The camera gets closer and closer to her until her studio disappears and all we see is Cléo’s face with a black background behind her casting her into a visual abyss. It is as if Cléo has entered a different psychological space to the others. She commits totally to the song, it brings her to tears, and then she freaks and lashes out at the musicians.
CLÉO
You unnerve me to exploit me … I want to be alone.
She pulls off her wig to reveal a natural blonde bob, puts on a black dress, her new hat, and leaves. The song has forced her out. It is the exact middle of the film.
This, then, may be why she comes home; Varda needed to divide the film in half, to show the two different Cléos in the city. And the song, then, and its grim confines of isolation and abandonment, is the key to her transformation. As long as she is beautiful – or conforms to certain standards of beauty – people will look at her. As long as there are people to look at Cléo, she exists, and she’s not alone. Her disease threatens her beauty, and then where will she be? Sans toi; completely alone. The song – like the tarot cards – seems uncannily to predict that future. Her perfectly made-up, corseted, belted, bewigged pop-star look is a mask – but who the real Cléo is, who she is underneath, she no longer knows. She has to look for herself in the cards.
* * *
In her description of Cléo’s origins, Varda talked of being inspired by a ‘character in a book by Rilke, who seemed dislocated’ by the city. She is doubtless referring to Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). A classic twentieth-century narrative of a destitute young Danish poet wandering around Paris, hoping to write, the Notebooks are a philosophical meditation on illness, death and fate. Brigge is disillusioned by the city from the first sentences: ‘Is it here, then, that people come to live? I’d have thought it was more of a place to die. I’ve been out walking around. I saw hospitals. I saw a man slip and fall. People gathered around him, which spared me the rest of whatever there was to see. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself along a high hot wall, touching it from time to time to be sure it was still there. Yes, it was still there.’
It turns out Rilke’s wall runs along the front of the Val de Grâce military hospital, in the Boulevard Port-Royal. I know that wall. It stops a block away from the rue Berthollet, where if you turn left and then make the second right you’ll be on my old street. Many nights I walked past that wall on my way home and looked at the dome of the baroque chapel, lit up gold against the thick navy sky, and felt so thankful to be able to walk past that sight whenever I liked. Rebuilt since Rilke’s day, the hospital is a modern 1960s affair, all cement cubes, the kind you find anywhere in the world, built in the universal language of hospital architecture. There are some military insignias out front and I wondered, when I walked past, about the people inside – are they all in the military? or veterans? What does the hospital specialise in? Is it public or private, nice or grubby? (These are the kinds of things you don’t know when you’re not really from a place.) There’s a sign out front that says Visitor parking from 15h–20h, or did I read that wrong?
I used to pass that wall twice a day, to and from teaching in the 16th arrondissement. In the mornings, to save time, I’d catch the 91 bus to Montparnasse station, then take line 6, my favourite, because when it goes above ground in the 15th you can peek into the windows of the Haussmannian buildings, before the train heads across the river and into Passy. As we crossed the river I would stand at the window to look at the Eiff
el Tower as it rounded into view, so massive from so close by. I’d try to catch a glimpse of Sacré-Coeur in the distance, up on its hill. On foggy mornings I couldn’t see it at all. In the afternoons, I’d get off at Montparnasse and walk the fifteen minutes home, rain or shine.
Now, looking back, I see my old self reflected in the biscuit-coloured stone of that wall, in its textures and its grain, in the soot that gathered in its fissures and nicks and notches. Will it be this way always? I wondered at the time. It feels like it will always be this way. Like I’ll always be teaching in the 16th and living in the 5th, like I’ll walk past the Val de Grâce every day for the rest of my life. I wanted so badly for that to be it. That route – that job, that apartment, that neighbourhood – was exactly the life I had dreamt of when I moved to Paris. I had friends, I had a boyfriend, I loved my job and my home and my journey to work.
The reality was less durable. The job was part-time with no hope of being renewed eternally. My visa and my right to work, and therefore the source of my meagre income, would expire imminently. My boyfriend lived in Tokyo. The relationship was bad, and doomed from the start. I laid down a layer of need over it, until I couldn’t do without it, and I couldn’t see what was underneath that need. Each piece of the puzzle had been meticulously assembled, and I defended it furiously. I had to. Because each piece – to mix metaphors – covered an open wound. I myself was a mixed metaphor, the wanderer who wanted to be a settler.
Things came to a head when the building I lived in was being refaced, and a metal exoskeleton of scaffolding went up. It blocked the light in my bedroom, and there were workmen on the terrace all the time, making my dog bark uncontrollably for hours on end, as they scraped and drilled the stucco from off the building’s facade. The dust seeped in, and the fumes used to strip the paint from the shutters made me ill, with headaches and vomiting for hours until I finally went to a hotel. Then, within the space of a week, an unrelated upstairs leak caused water to drain into the walls of my kitchen, loosening the shelving joints so they collapsed and every single one of my plates, spices and a jar of honey shattered into a gooey, dusty, spicy sharp mess. I wanted to scream and scream until they came to take me away. Then, at least, I would be someone else’s responsibility.It felt like everything I had worked so hard to build had been wiped out.
These are things that happen. These are the things that happen. All the stuff you have accumulated can be ground to dust in a moment. Those are not the things that matter. I came here with a suitcase, the refrain of the immigrant. When you first arrive, you waver, flicker; you are denuded of context. You quickly cover yourself with new things, a new persona. But you will live in a state of heightened sensitivity; you will always feel exposed, as if you’re missing your top layer of skin. The slightest paper cut is agony.
This was the thing I had to learn the hard way, over the years. Although I loved the way it felt to be inspired by Paris, set at an angle to it, able to appreciate the ways in which it was different from home, the initial joy of displacement eventually wore off.
I wanted to settle into a slot in Paris that corresponded to the slot I had vacated in New York. I wanted a job at the university, a home, partner, children. The same thing everyone back there wanted for me, but in French. I kept hoping the slot would open up, and I would gratefully slide into it. I was not a rebel. I was just someone who happened to have moved countries. Displaced, dislocated, I wanted to be re-placed, re-located.
* * *
Where Cléo’s face registered her anguish as she left the fortune-teller’s apartment, now her face is set in determination as she walks out of her door. In the courtyard a little boy plunks at the keys of a toy piano, the notes of the song we’ve just heard, as the soundtrack picks up its motif in troubled, fluttering arpeggios. She bursts out of the gate, and for the first time in the film she’s on foot and without a destination.
She walks up her street, away from the cemetery, towards the Boulevard Raspail. She catches sight of herself in a mirror on the street, tears off ‘this ridiculous hat’ and grimaces at her reflection. ‘I can’t even see my own fear, I always think others look at me but I only look at myself, it wears me out.’ She walks past a flower stall without pausing – those beautiful things, for sale past the moment of their death – and heads for the Dôme Café at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse. She puts one of her songs on the jukebox. All around her, people have their own conversations, their own stories. They speak Spanish, talk about Algeria, surrealism, painting, poetry. There are cubist paintings on the walls, by local geniuses perhaps, or in imitation of local geniuses, and although they echo the African masks in the gallery, in this context they’re not frightening. Is it because in the gallery they were (only?) mediated by the art market, while in the café they are decoration? Is it because by 1961 cubism has lost its radical edge? Or perhaps there’s another reason: by this point in the film the African masks and the art they inspired have already begun to be placed into another context, from one of frightening taboos to one of independent choices. Cléo is now a very different woman from the one who sat in the taxi. Independent choices are scary too, but not as scary as the feeling of faux safety Cléo had in the car.
The world is less scary when you have some control over where you go in it.
Postcards, playing cards, tarot cards, cubist paintings – all images that speak silently. Their story is subjective, their meaning open-ended. What they show can change from moment to moment, for they reflect the emotional state of the querent. They are just one of the many mirrors Cléo consults. There may be some certainties – medical ones – but for the duration of the film, things are not certain, they haven’t gone in the wrong direction yet. Cléo is still drawing cards. And once she reroutes her day, good things happen to her, promising things, that will allow her to take on the challenges of her illness.
She walks through the café to see if anyone is paying attention to the music. No one is. She keeps her sunglasses on. She overhears some people talking about an artist’s model she knows, Dorothée, and she decides to go and see her at the studio where she works. (This is a true neighbourhood moment – when you realise you and the people at the next table have friends in common.) Now we walk with Cléo. The camera no longer films her solely from the outside, but begins to show us what it looks like as she goes. There is no music; only the sound of her footsteps on the sidewalk. We experience first-hand the way people look at her, and the way she looks back at them. Men, women, old, young, Cléo meets their gaze head-on. Varda cuts in shots of all the people who cross her mind – images, one after the other, frozen, judging, like the tarot cards.
CUT TO:
A man in the cafe // the fortune-teller // the people Cléo passes in the street // Bob with a kitten on his shoulder // the monkey clock // José // Angèle // Cléo’s wig perched atop the mirror.
Her footsteps are joined by the sound of a ticking clock, whose noise recedes as she refocuses her attention on her immediate surroundings.
* * *
I don’t mean to make her walk through the city sound only positive, inspiring, validating. If the city is the cure, it’s also the malady. What she sees on the streets at first is a series of revolting penetrations: a man who swallows frogs and spits them back out again, a man with a thin rod piercing his bicep, a bullet hole in the glass window of Le Dôme where, later, they say a man’s been killed. There’s something abject for Cléo about these violations of flesh. But the men are all right; that’s the key thing. A man can pierce his arm muscle clear through with a metal rod and survive. The frogs make it out of their human aquarium alive. As for the man in the café: we don’t actually know if he died, or if there was even a man concerned. Gossip loves a tragedy. I’m learning to see, Malte Laurids Brigge says. Like Cléo, he sees things he doesn’t want to see, begins to understand what he would have preferred to leave obscure.
* * *
As Cléo enters the studio where her friend works as a life model, w
e see Dorothée perfectly still; the room is silent except for the sound of the art students’ chisels as they work. The camera – standing in for Cléo – circles the room, and as it comes into Dorothée’s field of vision she turns her head, looks directly at the camera, and greets her, cheerfully. It’s a startling moment, as we don’t usually hear the artist’s model speak. Another collapsed archetype; another image that says more than it seems to.
Cléo is amazed that Dorothée has no problem posing nude. She couldn’t do it, she says; she’d be too worried someone would spot a physical defect. Dorothée says they don’t see her when they look at her. They see something else, some idea they’re looking for …
DOROTHÉE
So it’s as if I weren’t there, as if I were sleeping. And I get paid for it!
The two drive around in Dorothée’s boyfriend’s convertible, and Cléo playfully engages with the 14th arrondissement as it passes by. The streets begin to speak to her as she becomes aware of the city in a new way.
DOROTHÉE
The names aren’t very inspired around here … rue du Départ, rue de l’Arrivée …
CLÉO
I would like it if the streets had the name of living people. Piaf Street, Aznavour Avenue. They could change the names when they die.
If you had the sound off, it would look just like any other nouvelle vague film: the open top of the convertible, the highly aestheticised black-and-white shots of 1960s Paris, with its billboards, its neon, its joyous embrace of all things modern. Except for the fact that it’s two women, on the road together, no man in sight, no guns, no brooding, complicated lovers waiting for them at home with a cigarette and a scheme. Godard famously once said, ‘All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.’ Varda proves that all you need is a girl.