Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Finally someone is talking about this movie.

I watched this right at the beginning of the pandemic, around the time I fried my computer, so I didn't have the chance to froth at the mouth over it as I normally would have done. But I was shocked I had never even remotely heard of this before I put it on. It's probably my favorite thing I saw all year.

This was my experience as well. I certainly came across Varda before Demy or Rivette, with only Malle and Resnais topping her (after Godard and Truffaut for the aforementioned reasons). I feel like Cleo was a fairly ubiquitous title when FNW or women directors came up and cursory scouring on the internet seems to check out in this regard. Finding a best of FNW list without Cleo or any other Varda mentioned seems to be a rarity.

So, a few things I would like to talk about. I don't think there are any spoilers for this movie as I won't talk about the ending, but if anyone reads, be forewarned, this is a lot of stuff that happens in the movie.

I was immediately struck by the use of color photography when the tarot cards were being handled, but not for the whole scene, just for when the cards were being handled. The fact that when we see the faces of the two women everything's in black and white was really interesting to me as, that early in the film I didn't know if it was going to turn out that the film was in color and these women would be in black and white or the other way around. My friend who I got to watch it last night asked me what I thought the cards being in color means. Do you have any thoughts?
My initial reaction was that Varda was a photographer and she just thought it would be more striking visually. Like I remember a friend of mine asking an artist at a showing what the red in his painting meant, was it supposed to represent the blood of these people, like their shared blood as a people, and he said, "No, I just really wanted that area of the painting to pop." It was purely compositional, aesthetic. I wondered, as a visual artist, if that was all she was going for was to open the movie with a visual bang.

That said, Varda's photography in this film is just unbelievable and so much of the time it is so thematic.
There's a great shot, for example, of Cleo/Florence standing in her white robe in the apartment and on the wall behind her are a pair of angel wings hung up as art but the composition briefly makes it look like she is an angel.
The tracking shot in the hat-shop, for another example, was so strong I actually backed up the film and watched it a second time (which I never do because I don't want to ruin the flow of a film, but I had to). The camera tracks from outside the shop, through the window, as she traipses through amusing herself and talking to herself as we see her in mirrors or through glass for so much of the movie.
I was particularly enamored of how she used mirrors thematically in the film. Mirrors can be so overdone and ham-fisted as symbolism, but Varda is actually so consistent with it, instead of using it as a thematic stab, that it becomes part of the fabric of the film. We see her in mirrors throughout the early part of the film as she preens over herself and is constantly putting on a show for herself, then we see her unhappy in the mirror a couple times, then we see her in the fragmented mirror (loved the shot where she sits down at the cafe and the post right next to her is covered with tiny mirrors so now even though she's at a mirror we can barely see her at all in it), and then finally in the broken mirror (we see her eye in it in this shot) before she is at last freed of mirrors and we do not see her reflection clearly again for the rest of the film.


It's not just the images it's the way Varda uses this visual theme (along with the clocks, black and white, glass) to mark Cleo's journey from the woman she was to the woman she becomes by the end.

This is also achieved through the camera and soundtrack. For the first third of the movie, the camera is almost always on Cleo and everyone is talking about Cleo. Cleo is even on the radio in the cab. The whole world, as far as Cleo is concerned, is about Cleo. However, from the time she leaves the apartment, we start to see the camera drift to the things around her, the people that she sees living their own lives, the conversations they're having that are not about her, and the camera and soundtrack begin to pay more attention to the world around her than Cleo herself, as Cleo herself does. Her fear of mortality causes her to notice that there is a world around her for the first time in our time with her. This is really beautifully done when we have the scene with the model where the camera focuses on the model the whole time as it weaves through the room to her. The camera doesn't even seem to notice Cleo in this context as Cleo is actually transfixed by someone else for a change. And, as I said, as Cleo begins to be less self-centered, listening to her friend and about her life, watching the movie, the movie structurally begins to reflect this change and we never see her reflection again.

The silent movie is another thing that was just brilliant. When it started I thought, "Do we really need to see this whole little silent movie?", but, in fact, we do, as it is an allegory for the whole film. Really loved that, what a great touch, especially with the doctor being carted away in the ambulance.

There are many other things I could talk about with this movie but I especially enjoyed the perspective. This really felt like a movie about a woman not a movie about how a man thinks a woman is and thinks and feels. In fact, I loved, as Roger Ebert pointed out, how the male characters and dialogue were written, really as the way a woman would hear us rather than how we think we sound.

Really, just can't say enough about this movie and I didn't even touch on the music yet.
Oh well, maybe later.

I had only heard of Marienbad before RT, so I suppose I had a passing acquaintance with Resnais. But certainly didn't know his name. I may have learned it (and Varda's) about the same time I started going to RT, since Hiroshima Mon Amour was a big deal there for a little while. Which I then almost immediately watched....and didn't like.

Well, you have my attention with a write-up like that.

This may be true now, as someone else has said, but over the 30-something years of my teen and adult movie-life, it was not. At least in my experience and it seems the experience of some others here. If I ask my friends about Godard or Truffaut, at least they've all heard the name many times, and they may have even seen one or two of their films along the way. But, hell, when I got my friend to watch Cleo last night, she knew both of those guys but had never heard of Varda in her life. And that's really all I was saying, I think maybe we're making too big of a thing about this, but for most of the time from the FNW to about 10 years ago maybe or less, it seems she was given pretty short shrift by comparison. That's all.

So what you're saying is I should've ventured beyond the horror thread every now and then? Interesting take.

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I actually watched Cleo before I watched Resnais but I became aware of Marienbad, Hiroshima and Night and Fog very early in my exploring foreign cinema. Night and Fog was especially prominent as it was a nexus between cinema and history (same to a lesser extent with Hiroshima).*

Though, evoking Criterion's authority once more, the Resnais films are all 100+ on the spine numbers.*

Cleo is 73.*

I know there are many variables that contribute to when something gets added but such a presence on THE boutique home video label means something for it's obscurity and prevalence when exploring the movement.

Ha!

Don't feel bad, Cap, the only reason I joined RT in 2006 was to be able to talk about all these new Great Films I was starting to see (Metropolis, Le Samourai, 8 1/2, Breathless, Trois Couleurs, Chungking Express, etc.) and to find more like them. And somehow I completely missed all of this Varda talk that was apparently going on the whole time I kept reading people ranking Godard's entire filmography, for 15 years.

I'm positive I'd heard of Roberta Findlay long before Varda. Someone failed me somewhere along the way.

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

In the many years I just lurked and didn't post, I pretty much read every thread top to bottom. So I was very well versed in what was going on at RT for it's first ten years or so. If I hadn't destroyed my once photogenic memory, I could have been the walking RT encyclopedia we all currently need. Could have cited every single mention of Varda all you folks blindly whistled past in your rush to Bela Lugosi up the place

It was only once I started posting that I lost track of all of the other threads happening around me. Something about being a participant in these forums turns the narcissism up to 11 and I started finding myself mostly visiting threads I was taking a part in. An unfortunate side effect of making oneself visible.

Blimey, I opened this thread and then had to focus on work for a bit. I came back to my PC thinking about how I wanted to quickly check in on the Top 100 thread, thinking that is where I had left off on MoFo. Saw the graphic above from Overboard and thought the Top 100 had been drop-kicked into the toilet. Whew!

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Sooo... should I ask what Varda film is a good entry point, in case I haven't seen any? I've seen several mentioned since this discussion started, but haven't had the time to get through all the posts.

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Cleo.

I've never loved it as much as everyone else, but it's about as seminal as you are going to get from her.

I know what you mean. I lurked for a year on RT before my first post. After that I was chasing discussions all the time or making my own threads and lost a lot of what other people were saying.

Terrific movie. Seen it several times.

Very good movie.

Very good, very indie movie. Shades of Persona.

Never heard of this movie, but will put it in my Netflix Q.

Love this movie. Seen it several times.

A Taste of Honey

Classic movie of British cinema. Seen it several times.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Someone was asking about Varda movies. Which ones to see, etc. This is my very favorite Varda movie. An astonishing story & performance from Bonnaire.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) -

If one goes into this film looking for clarity, they will surely be disappointed. While we get some hints as to what the film crews' task in the village is, it still feels fairly unclear by the end. The more time one spends in the village though, the more it takes on a lyrical quality. As the days go by, Behzad talks to the same people (a young schoolboy, a pregnant woman who lives across the balcony, a gravedigger who's always seen digging in the local cemetery) and drives to the same grassy hill whenever he gets a phone call. Eventually, you grow so accustomed to the day-to-day rhythm of the town that deciphering what the film crew wants with the sick woman (who, like the other members of Behzad's film crew, is never seen on screen) feels insignificant and unimportant. The best example of the lyricism is the photography. While most directors utilize landscapes for their scenic qualities, Kiarostami is more concerned with capturing the rhythmic aspects of them. Multiple shots of landscapes and streets in the film are shown multiple times, like the aforementioned hill and the roads leading to the hill which Behzad drives on whenever he gets a phone call or the various shots of Behzad standing on the same balcony or street with the same camera angles (except, the arrangement of the people in these frames will be different), thus creating "rhymes" to add to the film's visual poetry.

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This was my first Kiarostami, and I remember struggling with it. I've come to (at times) love his minimalist approach to story telling, and what he chooses to point his camera at (and, by default, what he turns it away from). At the time though I found the repetitive structure of the film very testing. Looking back at how terrible Ebert's review of Taste of Cherry is (which probably is a cousin to how I felt about Wind when I first watched it) I should probably revisit it at some point. I remember my boredom so vividly in the film though that I've never got the strength up for it.


Where is the Friend's Home is his mfing masterpiece though. And, coincidentally, probably his most approachable film