Film Forum

France, 1962
Directed by Agnès Varda
Starring Corinne Marchand, José Luis de Vilallonga, Loye Payen, Dominique Davray
Screenplay by Agnès Varda
DCP. Approx. 90 min.

“As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.” Seemingly soulless chanteuse Corinne Marchand starts to get one as she treks across Paris, from a tarot reader’s ominous prediction to a hospital for the results of her cancer test, stopping off for shopping, a musical interlude with pal Michel Legrand, and a silent comedy starring Godard and Anna Karina. “The portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris.” – Varda.

Reviews

"Varda turns a close observation of Cleo’s desperate whirl of activity—complete with the enticement of fashion, the delight of the movies (including a comedic film-within-a-film), and the hope of new love—vertiginously introspective."
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Read the full review

“Nouvelle vague at its freshest.”
– David Shipman

“Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.”
– Adrian Marti

“One of the few films directed by a woman in which the viewer can sense a difference. Agnès Varda sustains an unsentimental yet subjective tone that is almost unique in the history of movies.”
– Pauline Kael