Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962) is undeniably one of the most notorious French New Wave films, unique for its titular female protagonist, played by Corrine Marchand, and its female director, the seminal Agnès Varda. Varda did not hail from the Cashiers du Cinéma that boasted the likes of Truffaut and Goddard. Instead, she belonged to the left bank, a faction of French New Wave filmmakers who engaged with politics, philosophy and artistic experimentation within their medium. Cléo from 5 to 7 adheres to these characteristics of Varda's roots distinctly through an insistent exploration of mortality, female subjectivity and an existential navigation of life. For Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda adopts the typically masculine figure of the French flâneur, an urban wanderer and observer who walks with no true destination. But Cléo does not become a Flânerie, or flâneuse, until she becomes an agent of introspection, resistance and movement. In staging an inquiry into female identity, and mortality, Varda draws heavily on the existential philosophies of her contemporaries; Sartre’s assertion that “existence precedes essence” (Sartre, 1946, p.20) becomes key in this assessment of female identity, as Cléo, a famous Parisian pop singer, is caught in a moment of existential flux in the brief, suspended hours as she awaits a potentially fatal medical diagnosis. 

Cléo from 5 to 7 is split into a 13-chapter structure and this episodic narrative thwarts any classical arc of development or revelation. Instead, identity unfolds moment by moment, echoing Sartre’s insistence that we are always in the process of becoming something other than what we were. The film's title reflects this symbiotic relationship between character, the passage of time and the process of becoming. The two-hour diegetic window acts as a

meditation on duration and presence, anchoring the viewer in Cléo’s immediate and subjective experience. By rejecting the elliptical compression of classical narrative cinema Varda is able to focalise on a temporality that is lived and not abstracted. 

Our introduction to Cléo is deliberately voyeuristic, establishing from the outset her superficial identity as something observed rather than inhabited. The film opens with a tarot card reading, its imagery rendered in vivid colour, a rare moment of chromatic intensity in an otherwise black-and-white film. The bird’s-eye view of her hands picking out tarot cards leaves her face initially withheld from the spectator. This absence is striking as it denies her immediate personhood and instead frames her as a body in fragmented parts, controlled by unseen forces. The choice to show only her youthful hands, intercut with the aged hands of the fortune teller, creates a stark visual contrast that visualises a tension between youth and aging. After the fortune teller pulls the deadly hanged man card, Cléo runs from the woman's apartment in tears and at the building's lobby she finds herself standing in between two mirrors. This elliptical mise-en-abyme effect emphasises the infinite versions of herself and the existence of unactualized essence that she has repressed for the sake of her physical identity. Her voice over monologue reflects her initial perception of herself; “Ugliness is a kind of death. So long as I am beautiful, I am more alive than others.” 

One of the most persistent visual motifs in Cléo from 5 to 7 is the mirror, a symbol of both vanity and surveillance. Cléo’s world is saturated with reflective surfaces, from her lavish apartment to shop windows, constantly reinforcing her self-image as an object to be seen. 

These visual cues externalize her internal entrapment within a performative feminine identity shaped by how others see her, rather than how she sees herself. However, Varda’s use of voice over narration speaks to the existential framework of this visual motif, as she allows space for Cléo’s internal processes to exist and motivate the film form and lays the diegetic framework for the transformation she will soon overcome.

The spectator continues to follow Cléo through her daily routine, and she struggles to continue conforming to the superficial and structured lifestyle she inhibits whilst preoccupied with thoughts of her identity, mortality and purpose. In chapter 7, the shift from act one to act two is set in motion when Cléo rips off her wig, leaves her apartment and her Sisyphean routine, which leaves her wandering aimlessly. This brings the narrative to her to her final ‘mirror moment’, where she sees her reflection in a shop window and her internal monologue demonstrates the shift in her internal existential processes: “Look at that unchanging doll's face [...] I can’t see my own fears. I think others look at me, I look at no one but myself, it wears me out.”, capturing her prior condition as static, decorative, and defined entirely by external perception. No longer seduced by her own reflection, Cléo begins to articulate a transformed relationship with the self-objectification she has internalised. 

Once Cléo begins to shift from a passive to an active being, she actualises her own essence, and structurally this is evident as her movements through life become relaxed and introspective. Finding herself wandering around the Parc Montsouris, Cléo steps into the traditionally masculine role of the flâneur, as first described by Baudelaire, the city stroller who observes without being observed, garnering “meaning from urban space, thereby adding meaning to the space itself” (Wolff, 1985, p.44). Women who claimed space through observation and presence instead of objectification were not socially acceptable in Baudelaire’s period. Therefore, rather than adopting the flâneurs traditional detachment, Varda reimagines the archetype altogether. Cléo does not escape her body, instead she begins to live through it differently, she recognises herself as finite, but also as capable of action and perception. She no longer gazes into mirrors for affirmation and looks to the world around her for essence, enacting Sartre’s central concept of essence stemming from an understanding and acceptance of one's existence. 

The culmination of this transformation arrives in her meeting with Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the soldier she encounters in the park. Their conversation, steeped in reflections on war, death, and time, is framed not as romantic encounter but as existential dialogue. Both are on the cusp of uncertainty. He is about to return to the war in Algeria, and she is waiting

for a diagnosis that may mean death. In their shared finitude, they find a kind of equality. Antoine tells her that “dying for nothing is what distresses [him].” and this guides her in her journey towards acceptance of her mortality, reminding her of the inevitably of death within the ephemeral nature of life - that life and death are symbiotic stages of existence. Mortality remains present in this pivotal encounter but no longer paralyzing. In accepting its reality, Cléo accepts her own contingency and agency, which becomes evident in her reaction to the medical diagnosis she has been awaiting throughout the film’s duration. 

Upon learning she has cancer, Cléo is calm and accepting, a stark contrast to her melodramatic emotional outbursts in the first act. She tells Antoine, “My fear is gone”, marking the state of being she has transitioned into, no longer in existential crisis, but in a state of acceptance. This ending resists any resolution. Cléo does not receive a cure; she receives a diagnosis, but crucially, she receives it as herself, no longer a persona. Her walking, then, is not simply urban wandering; it is a feminist, existential act. It reclaims public space and redefines subjectivity. Cléo walks into the unknown not as an object of beauty or fear, but as a woman who has begun to exist. Despite ultimately moving closer to death, she simultaneously moves closer to acceptance of her mortality and the understanding that life cannot be controlled by its participants. 

Agnès Varda uses Cléo from 5 to 7 to reclaim existentialism from its traditionally masculine lens, repositioning it within the lived experience of women. In doing so, she crafts a filmic language that speaks to death not as a distant threat but as a structuring force of life itself demanding reflection, movement, and the freedom to exist on one’s own terms.