Elle est perdue.
A Psychogeographic Walk through Agnès Varda’s Paris in
Cléo from 5 to 7
● Writing
1. The Walk
Rebecca Solnit, the American writer and feminist activist who has dedicated much of her work to exploring cities and the act of walking, writes in the opening of her chapter “The Solitary Stroller and the City,” from Wanderlust:
“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go to the bakery or the fortune-teller, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible sprawl before you, beckoning”①.
2. The Fortune
Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7 presents one of the most fascinating cinematic wanderings through Paris—a city that, as Solnit writes, always contains more than any inhabitant can fully know. This is also a journey into the soul of the protagonist, which holds more than even she is ready to discover. It begins with one of the possibilities listed by Solnit: a visit to a fortune-teller. Driven by anxiety over a possible diagnosis of stomach cancer, the pop singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) receives a reading in the prologue, which she interprets as a foretelling of imminent death. Yet, as the fortune-teller (played by an actual fortune-teller, Loye Payen) points out, this particular tarot card doesn’t have to mean death in the literal sense—it might also signal a profound transformation of personality.
After Cléo leaves, the fortune-teller comments: Elle est perdue—a phrase that can be translated as “She is lost,” or perhaps more fatefully, “She is doomed.” The cards become an allegory for life. The film’s narrative absorbs the atmosphere of this opening scene (of both death and transformation), drawing all the color out of the prologue and rendering the rest of the film in the stark contrast of black and white.
3. Time / Death
In describing the inspirations behind Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda references the “man dislocated by the city” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s modernist novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). The story of a young Danish poet, destitute and wandering through Paris in hopes of writing something of worth, is a philosophical meditation on illness, death, and fate. In its opening lines, Brigge expresses disillusionment with the city:
“So this is where people come to live? I would have thought it is a place to die. I have been out. I saw hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him, which spared me from seeing what came next. I saw a pregnant woman, walking along a high, hot wall, occasionally touching it to be sure it was still there. And it was still there”②.
The looming presence of death marks the entire narrative of Varda’s film—and its rhythm. Cléo from 5 to 7 is broken into thirteen chapters, each marked onscreen by sequence numbers, time intervals, and a list of characters. Instead of unfolding in real time according to the ticking of the clock, the film builds itself from an archive of moments scattered across Cléo’s late afternoon. Each chapter has the potential to interrupt the story’s tempo, to fracture its rhythm—like Dorothée’s broken mirror, where each shard reflects the characters differently, distorted and incomplete.
The passage of time is already suggested in the film’s title. “From five to seven” refers not only to the hours we spend with Cléo but also to the French idiom denoting an afternoon tryst—a rendezvous between leaving work and arriving home. As Hilary Neroni suggests, in Cléo this time doesn’t refer to Cléo’s romantic life, but rather to her “short yet intense affair with the possibility of death”③.
In her disorientation and immersion in her own fears and projections, we accompany Cléo in nearly real time over the course of June 21st. The first day of summer—the longest day of the year—is also, symbolically, the longest day of her life as she awaits the results of a biopsy. Avoiding a direct confrontation with her potential illness and her fear, she wanders the city, while Varda’s attentive gaze follows her random journey through Paris.
4. Mirrors / Transformation
Varda constructs a complex portrait of a woman forced to confront not only her fears, but also her own image. She casts her as a pop star—a product of the postwar consumer boom known as Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty years of economic prosperity following World War II that shaped a society of mass consumption. Cléo appears as a reflection of others’ expectations and projections. She never misses a chance to look at herself. She checks her appearance in nearly every mirror she passes—as if their reflection could legitimize her existence.
Cléo seems narcissistic, superficial, hollow, and unhappy. She leads a privileged, banal, inauthentic life and constantly seeks validation in the eyes of others—specifically, the male gaze that helped shape her image in the first place. Varda reveals the darker underside of postwar consumerism, raising the question of whether it offered French women true emancipation, or merely a different kind of constraint. In this sense, Cléo’s value—as a product of that society—is inextricably tied to her appearance. In her carefully constructed image, she finds comfort:
“Ugliness is a kind of death... as long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.”
This isn’t just her perception—others, too, value her for her looks without caring to know what’s inside. She’s like the lifeless mannequins in the shop windows she observes early in the film: beautiful, but inert. Yet her beauty, to her, is proof that she is more alive than others. Death becomes, above all, a physical assault on her appearance. For Cléo to attain true subjectivity would mean accepting the fact of her mortality.
In light of this looming awareness of death, Varda invokes the vanitas motif found in the work of the German Renaissance painter Hans Baldung Grien. Baldung explored the sensuality and beauty of the female body, often portraying young women at the mercy of death: skeletons touching their bare skin or pulling at their translucent skirts and hair. Though Varda never references these images directly, she admits they “quickly became a force within the film,” in which the fear of death walks step by step behind the protagonist④.
Though Cléo longs for authentic love, she shows no real interest in anyone but herself. She lives in a state of oblivion, detached from politics. Yet in 1961, the Algerian War of Independence is still ongoing, and news about it surrounds her. Varda, along with other intellectual and cinematic voices, publicly opposed France’s military actions. By referencing the Algerian war, she situates both Cléo and Paris in a broader context. Behind the jukeboxes and overflowing shop windows, in a world of outdated but persistent superstitions and yé-yé singers crooning empty love songs, a war rages on. Varda weaves it into her narrative, placing the violence of French imperial militarism right at the heart of the capital.
Literal and symbolic contrasts and reflections are ever-present in Varda’s film, which takes us on a journey of possession, loss, and rediscovery of a stable identity. It is the path of a woman moving from object to fully conscious subject.
The film’s turning point occurs during a music rehearsal, when Cléo sings her song Cri d'Amour. In that moment, she begins to realize that she can no longer identify solely with her reflection. The screen fades to black, only to reveal itself as a curtain that separates Cléo from her previous image. She changes into a simple black dress, removes her blonde wig, and discards all the decorative embellishments that defined her earlier appearance. As she leaves her apartment (“Screw Tuesday! I’ll do what I want”), she escapes the stereotypical diva and star persona that her surroundings have imposed on her.
Like when she left the fortune-teller’s, Cléo finds another mirror on the street—but this time, she sees herself differently:
“I thought everyone was looking at me, but it’s only me. It’s destroying me.”
When she arrives at the café Le Dôme, she is unable to find her place within it. She is forced to confront her surroundings, which remind her that, despite her fame, the world continues to move forward, regardless of the life-changing test results she is anxiously awaiting. At last, she is alone, without the external attention and gazes that have so far defined her image. She can now direct her gaze outward. And it is then that she finally notices herself.
5. Flaneurism / Psychogeography
Varda introduces the figure of the flâneuse in Cléo from 5 to 7, drawing on the concept of the flâneur, a male urban wanderer central to 19th-century Parisian modernity. Traditionally, the flâneur was a privileged figure, someone with the wealth and leisure time to wander aimlessly through the streets, cafés, and public spaces, absorbing urban life without any predetermined purpose. Initially a masculine figure, by the late 19th century, women began to claim their place as equal spectators and participants in the city, as seen in the works of authors like George Sand and Virginia Woolf. While the term flâneuse did not emerge until the 21st century, much critical writing about Cléo interprets her journey through the city in terms of this female counterpart (e.g., Lauren Elkin, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Janice Mouton).
The tradition of the flâneur was inherited by early modernists, surrealists, and Situationists. In the 20th century, Walter Benjamin, in his groundbreaking work The Arcades Project, used the flâneur as a starting point to explore the impact of modern urban life on the human psyche, particularly examining how the city shapes the consciousness of its inhabitants. For Benjamin, the flâneur became a symbol of the alienation and passivity imposed by modern city life.
In Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda takes the figure of the flâneuse a step further. Initially, Cléo is depicted as a passive subject of the city, moving through it without much awareness of her agency. However, as the film progresses, her wanderings through Paris transform from aimless drifting to an act of self-discovery and liberation. Cléo shifts from being an object in the city’s gaze to becoming an active participant in her own life.
Janice Mouton argues that Cléo’s transformation into a flâneuse is “rooted in her direct engagement with the city,” and that Paris “both responds to her flâneurist activity and structures it”⑤. Varda deliberately chose locations that amplify Cléo’s development into a new subjectivity, encouraging her feminine flanery. These locations include: “rue de Rivoli, a busy shopping street; rue Huyghens in Cléo’s neighborhood; the café Le Dôme on Boulevard Montparnasse, where Paris’s artistic elite gather; and finally, Parc Montsouris, which Cléo visits for the first time, with its diverse passers-by and refreshing natural space, contrasting sharply with the previous urban chaos”⑥. Thus, Cléo becomes an element of the scene, as Mouton suggests, “both an observer of the crowd and part of it”⑦. The connection between Cléo and Paris is a central theme of the film.
In her wandering, Cléo transcends the figure of the flâneuse, claiming her subjectivity by embarking on independent, spontaneous, and open-ended walks through the unknown. She does not need to emancipate herself to access the wealth of Parisian windows and the atmosphere of its streets; they are hers to enjoy. However, true engagement with what she has been avoiding—the vibrant, unpredictable life of the city—leads to her transformation. Cléo instinctively breaks the established patterns of her daily life, surrendering to the rhythm of the street. This can be interpreted not only as an emancipatory act of flanery but also as a Situationist psychogeographic practice.
The Situationist movement, emerging in the 1950s, called for a revolution in everyday life through small acts of rebellion that would disrupt the passive, monotonous routines dictated by capitalist society. Focusing on the influence of urban spaces on human emotions, the Situationists developed psychogeography—an exploration of how the environment shapes individual behaviors. Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive (drift) emphasized spontaneous, aimless wandering through the city, allowing one to experience it in an emotional and reflective way, unbound by routine or purpose⑧. Debord’s idea of “potential rendezvous,” where unexpected encounters occur, further exemplified the unpredictable and disorienting nature of such journeys.
The Situationists believed that walking was the key to this exploration. In contrast to the passive flâneur, who simply observes, the Situationists sought to fully experience the city, breaking free from pre-defined paths and engaging with the chaos around them. Cléo’s journey mirrors this, as her transformation evolves from a passive wanderer (flâneuse) to a more active participant in the city's rhythms. Initially following a set route toward specific destinations, Cléo’s path later becomes more spontaneous, allowing her to break free and embrace the unpredictability of the city, much like the Situationist dérive.
Although the Situationist movement was not inherently feminist, and Agnès Varda did not consciously align her film Cléo from 5 to 7 with Situationist theory, there are striking resonances between her approach to the city and the Situationist exploration of urban space. Cléo’s walk through Paris mirrors the dérive—not driven by purpose, but by impulse, emotional resonance, and a desire to escape the routines of her life. In doing so, she not only reclaims space but also reshapes her own identity. Through her engagement with Paris, the city becomes more than just a backdrop for her fears; it transforms into a space where she confronts life, death, and beauty on her own terms.
Her walk, especially after abruptly leaving her apartment during the rehearsal, mirrors the randomness of the initial tarot reading: both are guided by intuition rather than predetermined goals. In this sense, it reflects the landscape of her psyche. The film becomes a map of Cléo’s fear, as she embarks on a journey to shorten the wait for the test results—or to distance herself from them, expecting the worst. Before this happens, however, together with Varda and Cléo, we embark on a melancholic, urban odyssey through the streets of Paris, mirroring her inner journey.
In her urban journey, Cléo embraces a Situationist dérive—a random, aimless walk driven by the environment’s pull. Initially, her movement is directed toward fixed goals: a visit to the fortune-teller, a café, her apartment. But as the day unfolds, Cléo begins to wander freely, allowing the city’s energy to shape her path. This shift from structured paths to a more liberated journey reflects Cléo’s psychological transformation, mirroring the Situationist’s desire to experience the city as an emotional and spontaneous space.
The dérive is central to understanding Cléo’s evolution: as she steps away from familiar paths, she opens herself to new encounters, both in the city and within herself. The city becomes a site of personal liberation, where Cléo begins to see herself not through the eyes of others, but as an active participant in the world.
6. The Encounter / Perspective (Refined)
As Cléo continues her walk, she becomes increasingly engaged with the unpredictable events unfolding around her. No longer focused on how others perceive her, the camera begins to show the world from her own perspective. It follows her as she tries to escape the crowd surrounding a street performer who swallows frogs, or when she observes a man piercing his body with needles. The idea of movement and transformation becomes central in this part of the film, as Özgen Tuncer notes:
“Women in motion not only constantly evade disciplining forces, but also provoke transformation in the territories through which they travel”⑨.
This shift from merely existing in the city to actively experiencing it marks the beginning of Cléo’s freedom. As Michel de Certeau suggests, “walking means not having a place,” and Cléo embraces the dérive, an urban exploration marked by spontaneity and emotional resonance rather than practical intent①⓪. Initially confined by clear, structured paths—visits to the fortune-teller, the café—Cléo begins to wander freely, guided by instinct and a growing sense of her own agency. As the day unfolds, she follows where the city leads her, from the sculptor’s studio where her friend Dorothée poses, to a local cinema showing a short film with Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard—a mise-en-abyme of the film itself.
By immersing herself in the city’s unpredictability and randomness, Cléo breaks free from the rigid roles assigned to her—the beautiful, passive object, the spectacle for public consumption. She becomes a participant in both the city and her own transformation. The psychogeography of the Situationist movement allows her to reject the control imposed by predetermined spaces and routines, enabling her to craft her own journey—a means of reclaiming herself through wandering. This disconnection from societal structures echoes the Situationists’ call for a revolution of the everyday, where even small acts of rebellion slowly but surely transform the world around us.
In rejecting societal expectations and surrendering to the unpredictability of the city, Cléo engages with its emotional and physical layers—what Guy Debord called the “spectacle,” the false facade of modern urban life, where reality is concealed beneath a veil of consumerism and social performance. Her journey becomes more than passive observation; it is an active immersion in the world, rejecting the passivity of consumption and embracing the chaotic energy of the city.
Cléo’s exploration of Paris evolves into a psychogeographic experience, where the city’s atmosphere, emotions, and randomness shape her transformation. In this sense, her journey aligns with the Situationists’ concept of the dérive—a psychogeographic practice demanding both emotional and intellectual engagement with the environment. The city ceases to be a mere backdrop for Cléo’s fears and becomes an active participant in her transformation. By wandering freely, Cléo transcends the role of passive object, becoming both part of and agent within the city’s dynamic flow. In doing so, she redefines herself and, in a broader sense, reclaims her autonomy from the spectacle that has dictated her existence. This autonomy is not consciously political at first but arises from her intuitive engagement with the world around her.
Varda’s film offers a nuanced portrayal of women’s liberation. Rather than following the well-worn path of presenting Cléo as a victim of societal expectations, Varda makes her the active subject of her transformation, undermining traditional depictions of female emancipation in cinema. Unlike other New Wave films, where female characters remain passive or secondary to male protagonists (such as in Breathless or Jules et Jim), Cléo’s journey is a gradual realization of her agency. Through her wandering, she confronts death, beauty, and identity on her own terms, with her awareness of her subjectivity growing over time.
This subtle critique of typical feminist narratives is evident in Cléo’s shift from object to active participant in her own life. Unlike characters like Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Anna Karina’s roles in Godard’s films, Cléo refuses to be defined by external expectations, taking control of her narrative.In doing so, Varda challenges traditional expectations of the female role in cinema, offering a model of emancipation that is more complex, more internal, and ultimately, more powerful. This active participation in her own story is far more than the passive suffering or romantic idealization often imposed on female protagonists in New Wave cinema, making Cléo from 5 to 7 a distinctive and radical exploration of a woman's self-liberation.
7. Perspective / Gaze
Varda was radically focused on the female perspective in storytelling. She presents the external world through the lens of her protagonist's inner experiences, concerns, and sensitivity, all of which shape her view of the material world. This method of building a narrative, first declared in L'opéra Mouffe (1958), maps the city through the eyes of a pregnant woman experiencing Paris. In Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda foregrounds the intimate experience of femininity, mapping the stories where both the women and the spaces they inhabit serve as points of orientation, creating a geography through which women can experience urban life with full freedom.
Varda’s characteristic curiosity for the everyday, attentiveness to detail, and ability to reveal what is unique in the mundane were central to her filmmaking mission. These qualities form the key to Cléo’s wanderings.
The Parisian landscape of the New Wave was a space dominated by male subjectivity and encounters of a romantic nature. The city was masculinized: men inhabit it and actively move through it. Though the New Wave filmmakers revived many independent female characters, they still imbued them with their own fantasies, often stripping them of authenticity. In Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda reverses the male gaze. Initially, Cléo is presented as a subject defined by the patriarchal gaze. Varda gradually undermines its power, using her own—feminine and feminist—gaze to allow Cléo to be the one who looks①①.
The emotional strength of the film lies in Cléo’s journey from being the object of the gaze to becoming an active subject of her own gaze. The looks she receives at the beginning of the film make her feel desired, but as she spends the afternoon wandering the city, her gaze turns outward. By revisiting familiar places and stepping into spaces she’s never entered before, Cléo confronts a new awareness of death. As Lauren Elkin suggests, Cléo, sensing the impending decay of her beauty, sheds her synthetic “self” and finally reaches a state of calm self-awareness①②.
Varda once described Cléo from 5 to 7 as “a portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris”①③. The director reveals the protagonist’s inner emotional landscape through the city’s panorama, mapping Cléo’s psychological tension onto the places and spaces she passes through. Cléo’s identity becomes intertwined with the identity of the city. Varda observes contemporary Paris through the eyes of a woman confronted with her own mortality. This confrontation marks the film’s entire rhythm, giving weight and emotional depth to seemingly incidental observations and encounters, and uncovering in everyday life subtle prompts for contemplating one’s existence. The journey through the city becomes a reflection of her spiritual passage.
We view Paris from two perspectives: alternately through Cléo’s point of view and that of an external observer interacting with the city. The camera shifts between observing Cléo and adopting her gaze, emphasizing the interaction between the city and the feminine perspective. Through Varda’s lens, Cléo’s gaze often pauses in close-ups on strangers’ faces, compelling the viewer to notice, examine, and observe them. Through Cléo’s fragmented consciousness, Varda filters the diffuse life of the public sphere—capturing snippets of dialogue in crowded cafés and buses, catching surprised glances cast directly into the camera. These moments may be read as Cléo’s silent contemplation of aging, beauty, and the body’s inevitable decline. But through Varda’s eyes, these same faces become a celebration of life①④. Through her use of camera movement, editing, sound, and lighting, Varda reflects the fluctuations of Cléo’s emotional state, inviting the viewer to walk with her through the Parisian streets. Thanks to these formal choices, the viewer’s perspective is aligned with the protagonist’s, granting access to her interior world. Cléo’s walk outlines an emotional landscape, which—through Varda’s carefully composed cinematic language—becomes a meditation on female identity, gaze, and mortality.
Varda was a part of the Left Bank group of filmmakers, who embraced the idea of cinécriture—a concept of storytelling that is at once aesthetic and literary, encompassing emotional, sonic, and visual registers. The distinctiveness of her compositions lay in every stage of the creative process: the script, casting, location choices, camera placement and movement, as well as the rhythm of the film itself. The film’s depiction of Paris is a testament to Varda’s photographic background. In a series of layered snapshots, she builds her own cinematic Paris. She captures a sense of immediacy and tension reminiscent of the cinéma vérité documentary movement, but transforms it into a new kind of fiction. The film serves as an authentic record of Paris in that moment—depicting spaces and scenes from the artistic milieu in a way only someone deeply immersed in it could portray.
8. Cléo’s Journey
The film unfolds almost in real time, without ellipses (aside from a few jump cuts), following Cléo as she moves through the city—on foot, by taxi, and on public transport. Her cinematic journey comprises six walks, two taxi rides, one car journey, and one bus ride. During the film’s preparation, Agnès Varda and her assistants spent a great deal of time imagining, and then mapping out, Cléo’s V-shaped route through Paris—from rue de Rivoli (1st arrondissement) to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital (13th arrondissement)①⑤. For Varda, it was essential to respect both the actual distances and the plausibility of Cléo’s path through the city. She meticulously timed each leg of the trip to mirror its real-world duration within the film’s geography.
As Valérie Orpen suggests, New Wave films reveled in the beauty and energy of Paris, as well as in the pleasures of walking—or better yet, driving—through it①⑥. Varda, with her characteristic authenticity, captures the Left Bank in all its early-1960s vitality, diversity, and social vibrancy, offering abundant detail that contributes to the sharply drawn image of the New Wave’s Paris. She conveys the city’s intensity as a lived experience, with a sensual delight in both image and sound. There is no illusion: we see real shop signs, authentic interiors, and the street hustlers operating on boulevard Raspail.
Extended driving shots through Paris reveal glimpses of daily urban life and its rhythms—traffic jams, horns, the use of hand gestures instead of turn signals. With a documentarian’s sensitivity steeped in the artistic life of the time, Varda builds the city’s identity through fleeting, singular images of buildings, sidewalks, streets, idiosyncratic faces, and small details that echo Cléo’s inner anxieties. Her journey becomes a way to give form to her fear of death—particularly through symbolic signs, like a funeral procession on rue de Rivoli or figures charged with unsettling resonance, such as a frog-swallowing street performer or a heavily muscled man encountered along her path.
Despite the locations being confined to a relatively limited section of Paris, the urban space in Varda’s film seems to offer infinite possibilities for movement, circulation, and transformation. Cléo begins her first walk after visiting the fortune-teller Irma on fashionable rue de Rivoli, on the street’s less glamorous eastern side, where luxury boutiques mix with makeshift market stalls. She has coffee in the now-defunct but once-popular Café Le ça va ça vient, located at the corner of rue des Bourdonnais and rue de Rivoli, surrounded by mirrors that multiply her reflection, while eavesdropping on nearby conversations.
She and her assistant Angèle then take a taxi across Pont Neuf to the Left Bank. The car winds through the narrow streets of the 6th arrondissement, near the university and Odéon theatre, where student happenings mark the start of summer. As the taxi heads further south toward Montparnasse, we return to broad boulevards—this time less commercial and more frequented by the city’s artistic and intellectual circles. Cléo’s apartment on rue Huygens is the only interior filmed on a soundstage—specifically, a costume storage studio for which Bernard Evein (Jacques Demy’s collaborator) created the set. The spacious boudoir, white from floor to ceiling with a monolithic bed and black accents, reflects Cléo’s fondness for surrounding herself with beautiful objects, blurring the line between private intimacy and the performance space on which her daily life unfolds.
After leaving her flat, Cléo embarks on her second walk—seemingly aimless—eventually arriving at the iconic café La Dôme on boulevard Montparnasse. She wanders both the café and the boulevard, casually interacting with strangers and overhearing snippets of political and artistic conversations. The café’s inclusion was intentional: opened in 1906, La Dôme was a central gathering place for the Montparnasse bohemia. Varda left its original interior untouched and used real patrons as extras, asking them simply to behave as they normally would. Prompted by a fragment of conversation, Cléo unexpectedly visits a nearby artist’s studio where her friend is modeling. The two then take a car ride to the cinema, passing through several transitional spaces, including the Gare Montparnasse. They mention various street names, reflecting on their deceased namesakes.
Later comes another taxi ride to Parc Montsouris, followed by a bus ride that quickly covers ground heading north through several boulevards, crossing Place d’Italie and then descending the wide Boulevard de l’Hôpital.
9. Transformation / Florence
By the end of the film, after her journey through the city, Cléo finds herself at Parc Montsouris, where her transformation fully unfolds. Alone, she sings and dances on the wooden steps, using the park as her stage—performing not for others, but for herself. In this moment, Cléo sheds the role of the star and the image imposed on her, moving beyond the objectified "reflection" she had lived with.
During a solitary walk by the pond, she meets Antoine, a young soldier. Their conversation about life, love, and death reveals a new perspective. Antoine sees Cléo not as a reflection of beauty but as a fully realized woman. His gaze shifts Cléo's self-perception, and in revealing her real name—Florence—she sheds her public persona, reconnecting with herself.
Just before her diagnosis is confirmed, Cléo faces the reality of her impermanence, accepting both death and life. The fear that has haunted her now meets with Antoine's more immediate fears, revealing a shared vulnerability. When Cléo says, “Everything amazes me today,” it marks her awakening—she is no longer trapped in her own reflection but has learned to see the world outside herself.
In her meeting with Antoine and her readiness to face the future, Cléo’s self-awareness deepens. The hospital scene, where she receives her diagnosis in a detached, almost absurd manner, underscores the absurdity of her past fears. Through this process, Cléo embraces her own autonomy, no longer defined by society’s gaze, but by her own understanding of herself.
Antoine’s presence in the park marks a pivotal moment in Cléo’s transformation. While her journey is primarily internal, this encounter with Antoine introduces an important external reflection of her subjectivity. Unlike traditional male gaze, which objectifies, Antoine sees Cléo as a subject—a person, and in this recognition, Cléo begins to see herself as a subject, not just someone defined by external expectations. This pivotal moment, however, does not offer salvation, but simply facilitates her ongoing process of self-realization.
Yet, it is the city of Paris that plays the most profound role in her transformation. In keeping with the psychogeographic ideas of the Situationist movement, Cléo’s wanderings through Paris reflect not just her physical exploration, but also a symbolic breaking free from the established routines of her life. Guided not by a set destination, but by impulse and emotional resonance, Cléo engages in a dérive, or drift, allowing herself to experience the city with no predetermined direction, embracing its randomness, its unpredictability, and ultimately, its transformative power.
9. Diagnosis / Life (Refined)
Emotional and geographical drift finally leads Cléo to the end of her journey. L'Hôpital Universitaire Pitié-Salpêtrière, the hospital where Cléo has avoided confronting her diagnosis, becomes the final, charged space in the narrative. Her long-anticipated diagnosis is delivered in almost absurd conditions: while in motion. She and Antoine meet the doctor just as he leaves the hospital in his car. Through the window, he casually confirms her biopsy results, leaving the pair stunned as they watch him drive away. Varda dynamically pulls the camera away from the characters, directing the gaze to the winding, cobblestone road outside Cours Saint-Louis—once again, looking outward at the city.
Does Cléo’s anxiety dissipate with the shot, as the diagnosis is revealed? The doctor’s response undermines the idea that questions of identity, beauty, and mortality can be answered before knowing when and how one will die—or if one will live. But the final confrontation with her diagnosis induces a mood of tranquility and happiness in Cléo (or perhaps it’s better to say Florence). With only half an hour of the story left, we are no longer mere observers of her. As the film reaches its conclusion, time becomes disrupted, reflecting the accumulated experiences of the character. Varda ends the film after ninety minutes, breaking the titular promise to emphasize the fractures that have taken place in Cléo’s life during her journey. In this time, Florence may form a romance—with herself, with the city, or with Antoine.
“I think people are made of places, not just those in which they grew up but also those they loved; I think environments inhabit us,” Varda said in a 1961 interview. “By understanding people, we better understand places; by understanding places, we better understand people.” In Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda captures the reciprocal power the city exerts on the protagonist and the protagonist’s influence on the surrounding space. She observes how Cléo’s inner world changes as she moves through Paris, and how Paris moves within her. Psychogeography allows Cléo to perceive the world beyond herself—the diversity, bitterness, transience, and, ultimately, the beauty.
The excerpt from The Wanderer’s Call by Rebecca Solnit perfectly encapsulates Cléo’s psychogeographic journey and her transformation from Cléo to Florence through the city:
"Suddenly jolted out of my reverie, I began to notice everything around me again—willows covered with catkins, the splash of water, shadows of leaves falling across the road. And I noticed myself walking at a steady pace—one usually only achieved after walking a few kilometers—my arms swaying in time with my footsteps, my body stretched and elongated, flexible as a snake. […] When we give ourselves to places, they return us to ourselves; the better we know them, the more we manage to plant seeds of memories and associations waiting for our return. New places, in turn, gift us with new thoughts, new possibilities. Discovering the world is one of the best ways of discovering the mind, and through wandering, we can explore both”①⑦.
What began as a prophetic warning, hanging over Cléo like a curse, now becomes a catalyst for self-realization. The diagnosis, once a symbol of her fragility, is reframed not as a death sentence but as an opportunity to confront herself, to confront life, and to reclaim her autonomy. In the same way that Cléo’s journey through Paris unfolded with unpredictable detours and spontaneous encounters, the film ends by emphasizing the power of the spaces around her to facilitate her shift from object to subject, from passive to active.
Just as the tarot reading suggested the possibility of a complete transformation, Cléo’s wanderings, guided by intuition rather than fate, allow her to transcend the initial predictions. In this way, the city becomes not just a backdrop for her fears but a living entity where she is free to reshape her destiny. In the end, her journey, though deeply personal, is also a quiet revolution—one that challenges societal roles and embraces the self’s potential for growth, change, and freedom.
In the end, Cléo from 5 to 7 offers us a portrait of emotional and existential freedom, drawn not from grand gestures, but from the quiet, unspoken act of simply embracing the unpredictable flow of life. Cléo’s transformation is not a clean-cut revolution but a gradual shift in how she experiences herself and the world around her. Through her wanderings, the city of Paris becomes more than just a setting; it becomes an active participant in her self-discovery, a backdrop where the tension between life and death is felt deeply and where, for the first time, Cléo takes control over the way she lives—and dies.
In the tradition of the Situationist movement, Varda’s film reflects the revolutionary potential of ordinary, everyday movements. Cléo’s stroll through Paris is not simply a physical journey, but a subversive act of detachment from the everyday structures of life. Following Debord’s dérive, her walk is driven not by purpose but by instinct and emotional resonance, leading her to discover the unexpected and challenge the roles imposed on her by both society and cinema. Her liberation, therefore, is not a grand narrative of transformation, but rather an act of quiet rebellion: reclaiming space, identity, and agency through the very randomness of the city itself.
As Cléo moves through the city, she embodies the situationist spirit of wandering, finding freedom in the act of drifting—allowing herself to become part of the world around her, while also shaping that world through her presence and gaze. This kind of psychogeographic journey, as explored by the Situationists, rejects fixed paths and embraces the chaos of the city as a means of self-discovery.
By the end of the film, Cléo’s self-liberation is not about salvation or finality, but about the continuing process of reclaiming her narrative. The film concludes not with a moment of catharsis, but with an ongoing exploration of freedom, identity, and the power of space—a journey that is both personal and political, shaped by the city and its unpredictable flow.
① Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, trans. A. Dzierzgowska and S. Królak, Kraków: Karakter, 2018, p. 261.
② Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Witold Hulewicz, Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1979, p. 15.
③ Hilary Neroni, Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, p. 100.
④ Marion Schmid, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, p. 95.
⑤ Mouton, From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse, p.3
⑥ Ibid.
⑦ Ibid.
⑧ Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, London and New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 77–85.
⑨ Özgen Tuncer, Women on the Move: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda, in “Deleuze Studies”, vol. 6, no. 1, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 114.
①⓪ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Katarzyna Thiel-Jańczuk, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2008.
①① Solaia Suherman, From Object, to Subject: How Cléo from 5 to 7 Subverts the Male Gaze, IRISS Archive, https://www.irissarchive.com/blog/from-object-to-subject-how-clo-from-5-to-7-subverts-the-male-gaze (accessed December 30, 2023).
①② Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, London: Random House UK, 2017, p. 212.
①③ Adrian Martin, Cléo from 5 to 7: Passionate Time, The Criterion Collection, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/499-cleo-from-5-to-7-passionate-time (accessed January 2, 2023).
①④ Nicole Kassell, Cléo from 5 to 7, “Image”, no. 93, https://imagejournal.org/article/cleo-5-7/ (accessed December 28, 2022).
①⑤ Les décors de Cléo de 5 à 7, [online PDF], Académie de Nantes, available at: https://www.pedagogie.ac-nantes.fr/medias/fichier/les-de-cors-de-cle-o-de-5-a-7_1588929122136-pdf (accessed January 3, 2023).
①⑥ Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7. French Film Guides, University of Illinois Press, Illinois 2007, p. 57.
①⑦ Solnit, p. 29.