Name: Through Agnes Varda's Looking Glass
Uploaded: 2026-01-29T17:21:24.000Z
Duration: 9 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Maybe because in the scene before, a fortune teller told her that an illness has come over her before pulling the death card and abruptly ending the reading.

Transition words & phrases

Maybe because two hours from now she'll get the results of a medical test that will confirm whether or not she has cancer.

So nervous that she's already assumed that it is cancer.

And the tarot reading has only strengthened that assumption.

In the agony of anticipation, Cleo focuses on her beauty, which has helped her in the past feel strong and vibrant and and alive.

For Agnes Varda, the director of this extraordinary film, it's not only a question of why her protagonist is thinking these things, but

And mirrors play a large and important part in this movie.

Cleo From 5 to 7, Varda's masterpiece is an essential text of the French New wave, an art film movement of the late 50s and early 1960s.

Better known for the movies made by male directors like Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.

Clio from 1962 arrived at the height of the movement.

But Varda had already prefigured the New wave back in 1955 with her first film, La Pointe Court, which is incredibly bold and experimental for a debut feature, not to mention beautiful.

You rarely see such technical mastery from a first time director in a movie that cost only $14,000.

But Varda had studied photograph in the years prior and it shows she knew how to accomplish a lot with a little Cleo.

Her second movie is more beautiful and more bold, executed with talent that matched her ambition.

The most experimental thing about it structurally is that it occurs in real time.

As the title says, we follow Cleo through an afternoon as she journeys across real locations in Paris, waiting for her dreaded test results to be ready.

This real time plot and the sword of Damocles that hangs over Cleo is the architecture that allows Varda to do what she really wants.

Paint a complex picture of a complex woman on a stressful day in her life.

That stress is what prompts Cleo to examine and ultimately confront her self image.

And it's for this internal journey, happening parallel to the journey across Paris, that Varda uses mirrors as a symbol.

As Roy Jane Nelson has pointed out, the mirror in this film is not really a tool for Cleo to see herself, but

And when she uses it, like she does to reassure herself at the beginning of the film, Varda shows us just how much Cleo lets these external perspectives dominate her Self image.

Of course, we're all affected by the expectations of others.

But women, more than men, are bombarded by cultural messaging that encourages them to value themselves according to their attractiveness, their ability to mother or tend a household.

So Cleo's illness, just the thought of it, begins to threaten her self concept.

If she's not a beautiful, healthy, up and coming singer, who is she?

When she meets her maid in the cafe after the tarot reading, she sees her image fractured in a mirror.

Mirror echoed by the mosaic of mirrors on the pillar by their table.

But she's able to quiet this identity crisis in the following scene in a hat store, where she once again takes solace in her beauty.

Everywhere Cleo goes, there is another one for her to pose in, as if they were the eyes of an adoring public.

When Cleo arrives back at her apartment, she makes herself into exactly what she believes her lover desires, a kind of doll and ADM her self creation in a hand mirror, almost as if it were a drug.

She uses her reflection for confidence, to prove to herself that this is still who she can be.

But then the man who comes to see her barely gives her the time of day and is gone almost as soon as he arrives.

Right after that, her music managers visit and ask her to sing a new song called Santois or Without you.

It's an unbelievably sad song about a woman who says she'll basically shrivel away and die alone, ugly, ashen, without her lover.

After she finishes it, Cleo realizes that this isn't her, that her managers are simply using her to create an image of a woman that serves their purposes.

And she refuses to be exploited any longer.

She removes her costume and places her wig on top of a mirror in her place.

This is the point midway through the film when things shift for Cleo.

She discards the identity she's made for others.

She ceases to be an object looked at even by herself, and

She walks toward the camera, looks left to see a store called, appropriately, Good Health, then approaches a mirror.

Before turning away and observing a magic show.

From here on out, Cleo will observe the world as it is, not as a reflection of people's expectations of her.

Others still look at her, still stare, still objectify, but she no longer sees herself in their eyes.

Later, she meets with a friend who models nude for sculptors.

Cleo wonders how she can do that without feeling embarrassed that they might see a flaw.

Dorothy is a model in more ways than one.

She models what it is to forge an identity from a sense of inherent value.

As Cleo takes this to heart, we see a mirror shatter on the ground.

It's the last mirror we'll see in the film.

In the movie's final sequences, Cleo explores her new freedom, first with herself in the park, then with a soldier that she meets there.

Annes tells him her real name, Florence, and

they interact as equals, as two souls unafraid to be themselves together.

They go to the hospital, where Cleo's doctor confirms the news that she's been fearing all along.

But even though it's bad news, scary news, Cleo doesn't feel as threatened as she once did.

And her mastery is all the more important because, well, cinema has been and often still is, a source of that warped cultural messaging that women receive.

As a target of that messaging herself, Varda used the experimental spirit of the new wave in a way that her peers couldn't.

To guide us through the house of mirrors that is our society, to guide us through and out the other side.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you don't know, you can use Squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything you might need.

A personal site, a wedding website, a site for your business or portfolio, and

in just a few clicks, you can have that website up and running.

Their design team has crafted really beautiful templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile, switching perfectly between the two.

You can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks.

And you can even link your social account so you can auto post to Twitter and Facebook all from within Squarespace.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to launch that site, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.