CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
Varda’s 1962 breakthrough feature is a 90-minute real-time analysis—from 5 to 6:30pm, actually—of singer Cleo (Corinne Marchand), who wanders the streets of Paris while awaiting the results of a cancer test. Death looms from the first scene, in which the protagonist visits a tarot reader, though the film remains dreamy and spontaneous throughout, as if in open defiance of any poisonous certainties. That’s not to say Cleo comes fully to terms with her unease so much as she finds a way to stabilize it. Among the many people she meets on her sojourn, it’s Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), a soldier going off to fight in the Algerian conflict, with whom she makes the deepest connection. Both of them face an amorphous horror, and find in each other a complement to their pain. The complexity of their final interaction—a moment neither explicitly tragic nor triumphant—is Varda at her best.

LE BONHEUR
Varda isn’t an ironic filmmaker, though her prizewinning 1965 effort, Le Bonheur (which translates as “happiness”), begs for such a reading. This tale of a happily married man, François (Jean-Claude Drouot), with a lover on the side offers a ceaselessly buoyant take on infidelity. François’s rationalization for his behavior is that he has enough love to go around, and Varda assumes his outlook from first frame to last. Indeed, the film never loses its lighthearted air, even when tragedy strikes. It’s only in retrospect that the full horror of François’s transgressions comes to light, yet Varda isn’t out to make a facile feminist statement. Le Bonheur is cinema as mind-set—it revels in the ambiguities of the protagonist and his situation, even using gorgeously photographed landscapes and two Mozart compositions to further impart his viewpoint. It’s to Varda’s credit that, by the end, François’s principles come off as both immoral and enlightened.

VAGABOND
Think of Vagabond as Varda’s 1985 remake of Cleo from 5 to 7, only this time the protagonist’s end is set in stone. We know from the beginning that the itinerant Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) will freeze to death in a ditch. Varda introduces the story in voiceover—giving this fictional reconstruction of Mona’s final months an undercurrent of documentary credence—then shows the character emerging ethereally from the ocean. Most of Vagabond’s scenes begin with a harsh measure of realism before moving off in more absurdist directions, as when the headstrong, irascible Mona breaks into a mansion and gets rip-roaring drunk with the elderly matriarch (Marthe Jarnias). Her last moments are even more bizarre as she’s attacked in the middle of an empty town square by growling men dressed in tree costumes. Yet Varda’s sober eye never wavers, no matter how strange the situation, and this gives Mona’s story a profound measure of verisimilitude that haunts long after the final fade.