On categories no. 3: Being trapped
This entry has been a hard one to write. It is only one small step, but it took a long time to figure out what that step was.
The starting place is Cléo from 5 to 7.
Cléo is one of my favorite movies because the first time I saw it, unlike with most films, every frame held my rapt attention and the unfolding story continually surprised me. On the whole, French New Wave doesn’t pull me in; though Agnès Varda is lumped in as its only female — and possibly founding — director, I think her objectives are much different than the others. She uses the camera like a photographer more than a critic.
Instead of seeming purposefully obtuse, her films are envelopingly observational, looking closely at encounters between people and at the textures that make the world; lingering on the things you see from the car window as you’re passing by, listening to the news on the radio, rather than ceaselessly watching the passenger/protagonists .
Thus, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a story where we observe its title character exactly as promised: from her tarot card reading at 5pm until after she has received the momentous results of a medical test she awaits at 7 (or 6:30. We can imagine how she spent the next half-hour.)
Over these hours, she covers a lot of ground around Paris; we move with her but don’t focus only on her. We get to watch and listen to so much of what is going on around us, around her, spying into other people’s lives (the couple breaking up at the next table; the man flirting with a woman on the bus) and meeting the gazes of passersby on the sidewalk. More so, we learn how Cléo becomes something to each of the people who surround her.
She is a capricious mini-celebrity at the hat shop; a perfectly obliging doll to her lover; a temperamental child to her maid/companion; an overdramatic primadonna for her songwriters; a beautiful woman who won’t smile to men riding in the car next to her taxi; a pleasant surprise to her long-time friend…
She herself seems to be driven only by her worry over the test results — she doesn’t seem to have much personality of her own beyond that, as her attitude transforms in whichever company she keeps.
But at about the half-way point of the film, that raison d’etre overwhelms all other viscerally false performances. Overcome by her panic and fear, amongst people who are close to her but keep denying those fears as unfounded, she transformatively becomes herself; she rips off the wig she has been wearing, unbeknownst to us, all along.
“Would that I could rip my head off with it.”
Cléo is not, by far, the most examined film of the New Wave, nor of Agnès Varda, who gained laudatory recognition from her future films, narrative and documentary alike. It can be read through its many cinematographic devices — repetition of mirrors, the wandering eye of the camera, or its philosophical underpinnings, for example — but it can also be read as watching this woman, on this particularly crucial day, trying to be seen as she sees herself rather than as she is perpetually boxed by others. Even though it’s not a blatantly ‘feminist’ film about female independence — she can’t manage to find her way around the city without someone else leading her — with every step it becomes a little bit more about Cléo becoming herself, even in this possibly cancerous body.
While I have known for a long time I wanted to write about Cléo’s transformation, what I might want to say about it has persistently eluded me. It was cryptically a film that I always knew was speaking to something crucial and profound, but could never describe what it was doing, specifically, to be so profound. Which actually, only made me love it more: when the meaning is easier to uncover, it becomes easier to forget the source.
Until last week, when I had to read a bit of Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, as an assigned reading in a course I am tutoring, and this claim caught my attention:
It would be a long-run victory of Nazism if the barbarities of the 1930s eliminated forever a Jewish person’s freedom and ability to invoke any identity other than his or her Jewishness. (8)
Sen’s overall argument is precisely in line with what I want to express in these posts: that we are all profoundly multiple, and what matters is how we relate to and manage to get along with each other in multiplicity. But this small paragraph clicked in my head why it is that Cléo wants to rip herself apart. The violence is not only in being categorized — it is in being forced into and defined only by that categorization.
Sen, and many others, tend to bring out examples where categorical violence is most visible and inarguable — like the tragic story he relates of a hired Muslim worker fatally attacked at his doorstep during the upheaval of Partition. But the violence of being trapped in categorization doesn’t need to be major, or even physical violence — those manifestations are often only at the end of long processes of more minor, everyday struggles, experienced by many more people and certainly impacting on their sense of life and livelihood. Cléo from 5 to 7 looks at how we might experience being trapped by categorization in ordinary life, at home, on the street, in the cafe.
Cléo herself is not disadvantaged. She is beautiful and she knows it; she has a spacious apartment (with a SWING!), and a maid who laughs at her bad jokes; she has a burgeoning career, and can unashamedly take taxis everywhere. Yet, on this day, for these few hours, she can no longer define herself as beautiful and flourishing in the way everyone around her sees it, because all she can see is her impending death.
Her story puts us as viewers into a body that shouldn’t seem to be troubled, but is struggling against its categories because they are so pleasant and frivolous. The condemn her to pleasantry and frivolity, until she breaks out.
The patient observation Agnès Varda walks, rides, and idles us around Paris, to think about how Cléo becomes to all those she encounters, as much as we get to observe the diversity of the city as she meets its gaze.
