This film follows two anxious hours in the life of Cleo, a beautiful pop star who awaits the results of a medical test (a diagnosis for cancer). For most of the film, Cleo pouts and frets and cries about her bad fortune and forecasts her dismal future, not on the basis of suffering or death, but on the loss of outward beauty and radiance. For most of the film, Cleo wallows in melancholy (the letdowns of her singing career, boredom, a lack of adventure, the slow passing of youth) but in the final third of the film, Cleo gains a more positive and liberating perspective from her friend Dorothèe (a nude model) and a chance encounter in the park with Antoine (a soldier off to Algeria). It is not until Cleo sheds her bouffant wig and ostentatious feathered robe that she is able to reflect differently on her predicament. The film, in this way, is so much about the feminine façade and the material entrapments of gender. Cleo is the quintessential upper-class woman, who in her boredom becomes obsessed with reputation and appearances instead of truly experiencing or creating. The encounter with Dorothèe gives Cleo a new feminine ideal—one that is much less inhibited by matters of costuming and performing. Antoine, the soldier, also allows Cleo to have an existential breakthrough (when discovering that her real name is Florence, he connects her to the “Flora” and nature), he reminds her of inevitability of death and the profound beauty of mortality.
Being that this film is so rooted in female psychology and idiosyncrasies it is the unmistakable work of a female director. Varda seems to simultaneously mock and grieve for her protagonist, marking an affinity and intimate understanding of the fictional struggle.
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