Cléo from 5 to 7

Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) competed at Cannes in 1962 and was her first feature in nearly seven years. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022 and is her defining narrative feature; the films that followed over more than six decades (The Gleaners and I, Vagabond, Faces Places) made her one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and of the international art-documentary tradition.

The film unfolds in something close to real time over a single Paris afternoon, slightly compressed from the five-to-seven span the title promises. Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) is a young pop singer waiting for the results of a possibly fatal medical test. She moves across Paris (the Café Le Dôme on Boulevard Edgar Quinet, the Parc Montsouris, a taxi ride along the Seine), accompanied by her songwriting collaborators (Michel Legrand and Serge Korber, in cameo). Antoine Bourseiller plays the soldier on leave who joins her in the park.

It is a real-time character study, and a film about what time actually feels like to someone who might be dying. Jean Rabier's photography, the mirrors and reflections throughout, and Varda's structural conceit of naming each chapter with a clock time have made it a lasting reference point for what duration can do in narrative cinema. Marchand's performance, beautiful and vulnerable and gradually clearer-sighted, is one of the best loved anywhere in the New Wave, at home and abroad.