A Day in the Face of Death: Cléo de 5 à 7 & Le Feu Follet

Two films. Both set in a black-and-white Paris. One was released in 1962, the other in 1963. The first has a woman as its protagonist, not just a woman, but a Woman: almost mythical, untouchable, elusive: Cléo, short for Cleopatra. The other has a man as its protagonist, Alain; a marked face, dark eyes, an inward-looking energy. Everyone looks at her. Everywhere he goes, he is told how handsome he used to be.

Cléo is waiting for a result that could announce her death. Time is kept for her by clocks, taxi meters and the chapters of the film: another hour, another three quarters of an hour, another twenty minutes. Alain has already written the date of his death on his mirror himself. He travels to Paris to seek out his old friends and lovers, as though something might still be found there that could make him abandon his intention. She fears that her future will be taken away from her; he no longer believes he has one.

They walk through the same city, through the same neighbourhoods around Montparnasse, enter cafés, take taxis, look at strangers and are looked at by strangers. They hear conversations that have nothing to do with them and watch as the lives of others continue, undisturbed.

The films are each other's likeness, or, at least, rather each other's mirror image: Cléo de 5 à 7 by Agnès Varda and Le Feu Follet by Louis Malle.

To understand how two films by directors from different corners could resemble one another so strongly, we must first understand what happened to French cinema around 1960. They emerged shortly after one another within the same broader renewal of French cinema: a period in which filmmakers left the studio, carried their cameras into the street and discovered that a walk, a glance or a conversation could be enough to make an entire human life visible.

I

In the 1950s, a young generation of French filmmakers rebelled against the established cinema. French films were generally shot in studios, under the supervision of major producers, with experienced professionals, literary screenplays and carefully constructed dramatic plots. A rigid world, the new generation thought. Actors spoke immaculate dialogue in artificially lit rooms; real life could no longer be found there.

With lighter cameras, smaller crews, limited budgets – often they had to stop filming because the money had run out, scrape a little more together here and there so they could start filming again – they left the rigid world of the studios behind. They filmed in real apartments, in real cafés such as Le Dôme, in parks such as Monceau and Montsouris, wandered the boulevards and exchanged the artificial light of the studio for the light of the street. Stories would no longer have to consist of great dramatic events beneath artificially illuminated full moons and the stylised movements of excessively articulating actors; from now on, a glance, a walk, a reflection, a chance conversation or, conversely, a continuing silence could be enough. Characters took centre stage, not events; film had to approach the experience of life itself: the passing of time, the presence of a body in a space, the contingency of an encounter.

The best-known expression of this renewal was the Nouvelle Vague, the New Wave. Some of its most important directors had begun as film critics at the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, a director whom, despite all my good intentions, I simply cannot bring myself to embrace; François Truffaut of Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) and Jules et Jim; Jacques Rivette, whom I know even less well; and my favourite, Éric Rohmer, of Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud’s), L’Amour l’après-midi (Love in the Afternoon) and Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter). They were young polemicists, almost activists – something Godard would rather overdo, the fundamentalist of the bunch – who believed that a director did not merely execute a screenplay, but through camerawork, editing, rhythm and mise-en-scène could be just as much the author of a film as a novelist was the author of a novel: the politique des auteurs.

It was certainly no uniform group. Godard played most explicitly with film as film: with irony, editing and the constant undermining of familiar cinematic language. Truffaut was rawer and more emotional; he tried to capture his youth as a troubled boy in Paris, but also the complex relationship between Jules, Jim and Catherine. Rohmer made films about everyday life, love, morality and the extraordinary human talent for using language to deceive others and, above all, ourselves.

In retrospect, this circle came to be known as the Rive Droite, the Right Bank. That is the side of the Palais-Royal (where the French Revolution began), the Conciergerie (where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned) and the Colonne Vendôme, on which Napoleon towers high above the Place Vendôme. On the other side was the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank: the side of Paris where the Musée d’Orsay stands, the Panthéon, Les Invalides, and the Tour Montparnasse, so hated by Parisians. It is also the side known in English simply as the Left Bank: the Paris where Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse and Fitzgerald lived, drank, wrote or painted. On this side, then, the Rive Gauche, a second, more loosely connected group emerged that is likewise counted as part of the Nouvelle Vague and with which, for the moment, I am somewhat less familiar. It formed around director Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda and her husband Jacques Demy, of the beautiful musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and they came less from film criticism than from photography, documentary, literature and the visual arts. Their work was often more essayistic and more interested in memory, politics and the relationship between reality and imagination.

Varda is nowadays called the grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague. Not because she was older than the others, but because her first film, La Pointe Courte, from 1955, already anticipated the movement before it had a name. Within that same imaginary family, Robert Bresson was the grandfather: his austere, concentrated films had shown how much conventional drama could be left out. Jean-Pierre Melville, then, to stretch the family metaphor a little further, was the independent uncle: not a member of the group, but with his location-shot, personally financed films an important example nonetheless.

Louis Malle, whom we are also discussing here, did not formally belong to the New Wave. He did not emerge from the magazine, worked rather with established producers and refused to commit himself to any shared theory or style. Unmistakably, however, he was part of the same broader renewal of French cinema: in his films too, characters left the studio and entered the world; in his films too, the city became a space in which a person could search for himself or lose himself.

These filmmakers, then, were not united by a single style or manifesto. What united them was the desire to say goodbye to rigid forms and ideas. They wanted to bring film closer to real life: out of the studio, into the street. But precisely by framing, editing and stylising that real life, they also taught the viewer to see everyday life anew as film.

All those names, film titles, confusing. So here is a family tree which, like all family trees, cannot possibly do justice to history, but can at least offer something to hold on to (and yes, I made it with ChatGPT, hence the strange faces, but unfortunately I cannot use Photoshop):

II

Cléo may have cancer and fears that she will die. The title of the film refers to the French expression cinq à sept: the hours traditionally reserved for an affair; after work, before returning to the family, a hotel room, a glass of champagne. But Cléo is no mistress: her five to seven is an interval between life and death.

The actual time we follow her is therefore not those two hours, but an hour and a half: at 6.30 she will receive the doctor's verdict. Time passes almost literally; time is given time to be time in the film. Until the verdict, she lives, as best she can: longing for and at the same time hiding from the result that will determine everything. Alain, by contrast, goes to Paris because he has already determined his future. Or at least, not entirely: he goes to Paris to search for something, however small, that might change his mind.

They walk, talk, live in the same Paris, as though they might run into one another on the Rue de Rivoli, that street that runs through the entire city from almost the Place de la Bastille, past the mysterious Gothic Tour Saint-Jacques, past the Louvre, the Tuileries, to the Place de la Concorde.

Two bodies, moving through the same city, both in the face of death; one wants to evade it, the other can hardly wait.

Both Cléo and Alain begin in an enclosed space. The former sits opposite a fortune-teller who turns over tarot cards for the Frenchwoman and reads death in them, without daring to say it aloud. Alain is in a rehabilitation clinic in Versailles, where the doctors have declared him cured of his alcoholism. The cards tell Cléo that her body will fail her; the clinic tells Alain that his body functions again; and both relate ambiguously to the sealing of their fate. Cléo hopes, Alain doubts.

Le Feu Follet is a film based on a short novel by the writer Drieu la Rochelle: in the book, Alain, based on Jacques Rigaut, a poet and friend of the author, is not addicted to alcohol but to heroin. Louis Malle, the director, moves the story from the 1930s to the early 1960s, and with the transformation of the addiction he does something important: it becomes more ordinary. Easier to feel. Easier to recognise. A heroin addict, a junkie, something like that would not touch us because it belongs to a closed underworld; alcohol, however, is everywhere, it is the lubricant of the bourgeoisie, what happens to Alain could happen to us too.

Both leave their rooms and enter the city.

Cléo first looks into a mirror, still a kind of intermediate space between the tarot reader and the world. A knee-length polka-dot dress, her hair pinned up, heels on; a woman of the modern world. To the mirror she says: “Ugliness is a form of death. As long as I am beautiful, I am alive — and ten times more so than the others.” Vanity as an incantation against her fear of death.

She smiles at herself, opens the door, into the city. She cannot sustain the incantation for long, because in the café, where her maid is waiting for her, her spirits sink. She will remain there between 5.08 and 5.13. When she cries out in despair, her maid mainly accuses her of hysteria. Cléo tries to hold on to her life; with her maid she buys a hat, takes a taxi in a beautiful scene – delighted as they are to be sitting in a new Citroën, while we hear news about Algeria. Then the female taxi driver puts on a song she says she likes; irritated, Cléo asks her to turn it off, she dislikes the recording: it is her own song and her own voice. Paris: a city of distraction, concealment, a city that keeps confirming her vanity, it is a city that intrudes. Whenever Cléo falls silent for a moment, we hear what the people around her are talking about: a discussion about Picasso, relationships being broken off, nostalgic recollections. We do not know for certain whether she hears it as we do, but the world is always dynamic, playful, life goes on. Paris a city opening itself up, a city in which you want to remain alive. And again and again there is that vanity: men look, women watch themselves being looked at — a maxim that might have been engraved on Cléo's hat.

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III

Alain travels from Versailles to the city to seek out his former friends and lovers one last time. She goes outside because she is afraid to be alone; he seeks out others to discover whether he still exists somewhere in them.

But we have travelled to Versailles too quickly. Le Feu Follet does not begin in the clinic at all, but in another room: a bedroom. Alain lies half on and half beside Lydia. Her gaze is fixed on the ceiling, Alain’s on Lydia: “Once again the feeling slipped away from him,” the film’s narrator repeats the words of the book, “like a snake between two stones.” Alain lays his head down beside Lydia’s, she continues staring at the ceiling and holds him. What Louis Malle leaves out, but Drieu la Rochelle does write in the book, is: “Afterwards, when his flesh forgot itself, he felt a sense of uselessness and let himself slide off her.” Or rather, the director does not leave it out. He allows the physical failure to remain present in the posture of their bodies. “Lydia opened her eyes again. She saw only a hairy torso, no head. She did not care: she too had felt nothing particularly intense, but the mechanism had been set in motion, and she had never known anything more than this distinct sensation, which radiated nothing.”

Twice Drieu la Rochelle describes something very directly physical in detached terms: flesh that forgets itself, a mechanism being set in motion. Enfin. The temptation to turn this into a literary analysis is considerable. Back to the film.

Alain has failed to maintain his erection. The film is more implicit about it; but that is what seems to happen. Afterwards they light a cigarette, get dressed, talk about his marriage to an American woman whom he never sees anymore, and she takes him back to the clinic.

The clinic is a gathering place for members of the haute bourgeoisie who, for whatever reason, have been unable to cope with real life. The doctor, Dr La Barbinais, afraid as he is of treating people who are actually ill, seems more interested in collecting people of name and reputation than in venturing into the frightening world of the truly sick. “They were not mad, merely weak,” Drieu la Rochelle writes — harsher than the Dutch translation, which speaks of “vulnerable people.” Yet Alain likes it there. When Lydia asks him why he stays, since he is cured after all, he answers that he feels at home there. There is structure. The real world does not enter. It is manageable. Sheltered. Alain is in no great hurry to step into life.

His room would make many people jealous. Spacious. Full of books, portraits, photographs of his wife and newspaper clippings about suicide and death. And a mirror with the words written on it in marker: 23 July.

In the common room, discussions are held about Thomas Aquinas and Thomism and whether it was he who separated philosophy and theology. About Racine, Cocteau, Proust, Genet.

Back in his room, that mirror with 23 July appearing in the frame again and again while Satie’s Gnossienne plays softly, Alain starts writing, stops while smoking, polishes his shoes. He picks up his pistol. Lets it pass from one hand to the other. Observes it. Looks down the barrel and says: “Life flows too slowly in me. So I accelerate it.”

23 July.

Both entrust something about their mortality to a mirror. Cléo looks at her face and searches there for proof that she is alive; Alain has written on the glass a date on which he intends to disappear. Her mirror must confirm her body, his has become a gravestone. The doctor enters the room, says that Alain is cured: Alain himself does not believe it. Then the doctor says — and this matters, because Drieu la Rochelle does the same, albeit at another moment — before the war you were a different man. Alain responds sharply; he does not want to talk about it. A seemingly casual remark that nevertheless contains an entire past; it offers no answers, but lifts a tiny corner of the veil over Alain. Whether he was traumatised by that war, or whether in that war he felt truly alive, whether life then had weight, gravity, whether the unbearable lightness had finally been lifted, remains unclear.

From the clinic, Alain travels into the city with two workers. They talk a little. What does he do for work, no work, he replies, is he rich then, no, not that either, he is ill.

In Paris he goes to a café where he used to be a regular. Here, for the third time in the film, someone remarks that he was so handsome once, but has fallen into decline.

IV

Everywhere Alain appears, he is told how handsome he used to be. The face is still there, the sharp features, the dark hair, but his beauty already belongs to the past. People recognise it as they recognise an old café that has become a laundrette: something beautiful used to be here. What is saddest is that Alain is even more acutely aware of this himself: once he was handsome enough to let women support him, as we learn especially from the novel, but das war einmal. Alain takes a taxi through Paris in search of — yes, of what exactly, life or death? Cléo, meanwhile, returns home. It is now 5.25 p.m. Her beauty still entirely intact.

At home, too, there are mirrors. Everywhere, really. The room is white and light, almost weightless, with a swing, soft cushions, kittens; the setting in which a myth is preserved rather than a room in which a woman eats, drinks, pisses, shits, perhaps fucks, in short: lives. Her lover José comes by, kisses her, looks at her, calls her beautiful and then has to leave again. As though he merely wanted to refresh himself for a moment at the well of her beauty, to appropriate that beauty before stepping back out into the world. One person smokes a cigarette, another drinks a cup of coffee, José drops in on Cléo. Once, perhaps, his affirmation was enough for her; a woman so accustomed to being beautiful that by now she had become entirely identical with it. And yet it is as though, by naming her beauty in the mirror, a rupture has appeared for the first time between who she is and how beautiful she is; she can no longer coincide with it now that death may be imminent. She may live ten times more, but perhaps not for very long. When José sees the hot-water bottle and asks what is wrong with her, he dismisses her illness as imagination: her beauty proves, after all, that she is healthy. José responds to the old, coquettish and playful Cléo, who seemed to coincide completely with her appearance; who she is behind that beauty, he cannot see — but neither can Cléo herself.

For both of them, beauty has become a trap: Cléo must discover that she is more than her beauty; Alain sees in the disappearance of his one more piece of evidence that everything he lived on is being exhausted.

A little later Bob and Maurice enter, her composer and lyricist. They joke, play, put on wigs and turn her fear into a performance once again. Then Cléo begins to sing. Sans Toi.

Sans toi still begins as a rehearsal. Michel Legrand sits at the piano, Cléo stands beside him and at first the camera does what everyone around her has always done: it looks at her. But as the song progresses, the room disappears. The accompaniment grows fuller, the background black; for the first time there is nothing left between Cléo and the thing she fears. No hat, no lover, no joke, no passing conversation. Only her voice and the words describing her own death. Until now she sang songs that might just as easily have played on a car radio, detached from the woman singing them. Now she hears herself.

"Beautiful, but in vain,

naked in the heart of winter,

I am a yearning body

without you, without you.

Consumed by melancholy,

dead in a glass coffin,

I become covered in wrinkles

without you, without you.

And if you come too late,

they will already have buried me,

alone, ugly and deathly pale,

without you, without you,without you.”

Everything comes together here: death, of course, from which she is constantly trying to run, but also what that possible death tells her and what she is equally trying to hide from: that beauty cannot ward off death, that it does not survive death and does not even endure within a single lifetime. But the song says something else as well. Without another, beauty is “beautiful, but in vain.” Cléo is constantly looked at, admired and indulged, but the toi to whom she can truly speak is absent.

A tear runs down her cheek. Quietly, neutrally, almost technically. Her face does not tell us that she is crying; the tear is simply there. There, on her cheek.

When the song ends, she bursts out: everyone spoils her, but no one loves her. She pulls off her wig, exchanges her white robe for a simple black dress and leaves her apartment. It seems a small change, hardly more than a costume change, but it is the first act that is truly her own. The woman who goes outside is less conspicuous than the woman who came in and precisely for that reason more present. Cléo stops carrying herself as an image that must be shown to the world.

Because as soon as she is outside in Montparnasse, she looks into a mirror again, in a Chinese restaurant, with Chinese characters painted across it. A covered mirror, as it were; no longer clear, with the sole purpose of reflecting her beauty. “That unchanging doll’s face. That stupid hat. I cannot see my own fears. I always think everyone is looking at me; mostly I am looking at myself. It exhausts me.”

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V

Alain undergoes the opposite movement. He too has existed for years in the gaze of others: as a handsome young man, a seducer, a dandy, someone of whom a great life was still expected. But where Cléo begins to detach herself from her image, Alain discovers that behind his former appearance no other existence has been built. His beauty disappears and seems to take everything with it.

In Paris, therefore, the encounters are not merely encounters. They are measurements Alain takes. He places other lives beside his own as possibilities. The first is Dubourg, a childhood friend who has left the night behind him, married, had children and devoted himself to Egyptology. Everything Alain lacks is sitting at Dubourg’s table: work, regularity, a family, days that do not need to be killed because they naturally pass into other days. Dubourg believes Alain can still change. Alain looks around and sees only a life he could never enter. Would not even want to enter. The life Dubourg leads is, to Alain, a living death; he would rather actually die.

Their walk through Paris is, as far as I am concerned, not only one of the highlights of the film, but of the entire history of cinema. This sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it completely. In many films, real talking is avoided; with Woody Allen, characters seem to think deeply about the world, but talking functions mainly as a sublimation of violence and a hierarchical game; for Rohmer, talking is above all a way of deceiving yourself; the conversation between Alain and Dubourg is none of these things: it is a real conversation – precisely the kind of conversation that is so ordinary in real life and so rarely seen on screen. In Utrecht, Amsterdam, Paris, I have always walked through cities like this with friends. Talking. Discovering one another and, along the way, ourselves, our relationship to one another, to who we are, to the story we tell about ourselves. Really talking about love, fears, marriages that succeed or fail, sexuality or the fear of it, money, debts, music, art, films, plans. The two friends, between whom the relationship is complex because all relationships are complex, who share a past and in the present have drifted further and further apart, Dubourg trying to save Alain, Alain looking down on Dubourg, woven through all of this is an enormous honesty between two men who are not afraid to truly enter into conversation with one another.

Of course: there are layers at play, as in every conversation. Dubourg is trying to defend his choices, Alain is trying to evade Dubourg’s controlling gaze. So enormous honesty may be putting it somewhat strongly; as honest as possible. In any case: a real conversation. That is also why I discuss and quote it at length, because it would be a shame to cut furiously into it when precisely the way the conversation builds has value.

At Dubourg’s home there is a domestic calm: a wife, laughing children, love. The Egyptologist has found his peace and his home. When the family has left, Alain sits on a chair with his elbows on his knees and his friend stands, and the latter asks how he is doing. Alain feels empty. Dubourg says that life is worthwhile, that surely you have to do something. In that sense, Alain is no more seen by his friend than Cléo is by José. And at the same time he is seen much more, sometimes more than he sees himself.

When Dubourg says that it feels good to do something well and Alain answers that he does not know that feeling, that all he ever did was chase money, his friend replies: “That’s just what you say. What you call money is an excuse to daydream.”

And when Alain attacks him, when Dubourg says that he prefers a man whose passion has produced something visible to passion alone and Alain says: where, then, is the passion here, in this house, he replies: “You keep going on about my withdrawn bourgeois existence, but my life is more intense now – with my wife and her children – than when I was always drinking and sleeping around.”

From the Jardin du Luxembourg, Malle leads them, with a few leaps through the sixth arrondissement, via the Rue d’Assas and Place Saint-Sulpice to the colonnade of the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

In the garden, Alain asks his friend whether his life actually satisfies him. That question does not matter. But what if he becomes bored with his life? Dubourg answers that Fanny and her daughters, that stuffy house, all of it is part of his passion. And, Alain responds, the spark in your eyes, your enormous energy, what happened to that? Dubourg has grown older. Some things have disappeared, hope, the desire to storm the world is no longer there, but he has built certainties in place of castles in the air. Yes, he has left his youth behind, but in exchange for a new life.

“You, on the other hand, turn your back on growing up. You reject it. You are stuck in adolescence.”

“It is hard to be a man. You have to want to be one,” Alain replies.

“Don’t you ever get tired of those mirages?”

“I cannot stand mediocrity.”

And then comes a moment that, despite everything, shows the honesty between these two friends. Dubourg replies: “You have just spent ten years in gilded mediocrity.”

Alain looks slightly surprised, cynical, critically too, at his friend. “And I’ve had enough of it. I’m stopping.”

Then another scene, but the conversation continues; by now we have left the Jardin du Luxembourg.

“I refuse to grow up/grow old,” Alain complains.

And then comes such a beautiful response: “You miss your youth as though you had lived it to the full.”

Alain: “It was a promise. And a lie. I was the liar.”

They continue walking, a group of Parisiennes passes between them, laughing together. Alain and his friend look at the group, amused.

“You are tortured by the idea of women.”

Alain laughs broadly, perhaps for the first time in the entire film: “I have no power over them. When I was twenty, I was handsome. They still like me, still find me pleasant, but it is not enough. I have lost my influence. And yet: it is only thanks to women that I have experienced some sense of control over life, that I have been able, somehow, to get a grip on life.”

The friends continue walking. Now through the gallery of the Odéon Theatre while they smoke.

“I started drinking while I was waiting for things. Then, one day, I realised I had spent my life waiting. For women. Money. Action. So I drank myself to death.”

Then the film makes a circular movement back to the opening scene, where “the flesh forgot itself”. Dubourg says, after all, that he has Dorothy, his wealthy American wife, and that he does not need to sleep with her to prove it.

“I don’t have her,” Alain says. “I wasn’t a good lover.”

“She fled from your drinking.”

“I drank because I was a bad lover,” Alain says, raising his voice.

Then the final part of their encounter. Alain says to his friend, after the latter has tried to stir the will to live in him: “You and your mediocre certainties!” And without looking he steps into the road. Dubourg runs after him, grabs him by the shoulders: “Let mediocrity be enough. Then you will regain some of your energy. You have no backbone. You are weak. You are lazy. Certainties frighten you. You defend the shadows because the sun hurts your eyes.”

Alain stops walking, turns towards his friend, looks into his eyes with an urgent intensity while gripping him by the upper arms: “Are you my friend? If you are my friend, then you have to take me as I am. Not otherwise. Let me look at you. I wanted you to help me die. That is all.”

Dubourg cannot do this. He continues to insist on Alain’s will to live, that it must be hiding somewhere and that they only need to find it. When we see Alain walking, hurriedly, alone through one of Paris’s many rues, we hear the final words of the friend from whom he has now parted.

Nor could it have been otherwise. If Dubourg takes Alain as he is, he must respect his wish to die; if he tries to save him, he refuses to take him as he is. What, then, is the right attitude for Dubourg? Again and again he tries to puncture Alain’s arguments, often successfully, but he forgets that this level has long since ceased to matter. The decision has been prepared, perhaps even made: a date has been written on the mirror, he has already looked down the barrel. What could Dubourg possibly still say that would help. But perhaps, in this insoluble position, Dubourg does what a true friend can still do: refuse to go along with the image Alain has created. Again and again he denies his friend that sometimes sardonic power. As though he almost wanted to say, if he had been able to accept the death wish that far: all right, if you want to kill yourself, then do it. But do it on honest grounds, in the knowledge of the castles in the air you have built around yourself and the world; then at least be truly honest about why you are doing it. That might perhaps be the most that can be achieved. Dubourg sees that Alain is hiding behind shadows. Alain is also right that Dubourg’s salvation would mean that he would have to become someone else. So they truly speak to one another, but precisely through that honesty arrive at a boundary where words fall silent.

And what is truth, the New Testament already asked. From Dubourg’s perspective, his friend is childish, someone unwilling to resign himself to the everydayness of life, unwilling to grow up, unwilling to take responsibility, wanting to remain standing still. Almost someone who struggles so much with the fact that he cannot relive the “gilded mediocrity” of his past as his future, that his chance has passed, his peak, that therefore he wants to die. An adolescent. This image is certainly convincing. But is there not much more going on with Alain? Is this discussion not ten minutes of dialogue attempting to grasp something that cannot really be grasped: someone no longer wants to live, can no longer live, longs more for the silence of dying than for the noise of Paris, the touch of women, the laughter of children. Dubourg searches for rationality, and on that level Alain does indeed seem rather adolescent. But his subdued manner, his clammy face and his derealisation: the world seems to be taking place behind a window – he can still see it, but can no longer feel it – tell us something for which “refusal to grow up” is too small. Perhaps that is why Malle uses so many words only to make visible, in the end, the limit of words. The conversation can analyse Alain’s condition, but cannot contain it. What Dubourg cannot understand and Alain cannot explain, the ravaged face of actor Maurice Ronet carries in deafening silence.

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VI

While Alain wanders on alone after his conversation with Dubourg, Cléo too is now walking alone through Paris. But their loneliness moves in opposite directions. For Alain, the world retreats further and further behind glass; for Cléo, the glass is beginning to break.

In the famous Café Le Dôme in Montparnasse, a café where Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and countless other artists spent their time – on the Rive Gauche, then – Cléo puts a coin in the jukebox and plays her own song. A clock shows that it is now 5.50 p.m. While she searches for the right song, we see two men at a table talking about “the madness in Algeria”. Cléo puts on sunglasses, walks out onto the terrace and sees all the people there talking to one another: about a conference, about surrealism, and a woman sitting with, presumably, her boyfriend and complaining that she cannot understand him with all that noise in the background. Cléo stops, turns around, walks across the terrace again and goes back inside. People are busy with all sorts of things, eating, drinking, serving, they talk about all sorts of things, no one is paying attention to the song she has put on.

This is an important scene and certainly not an unambiguous one, because several things are happening at once. The music she puts on, then the sunglasses as though she is afraid of being seen putting on her own music herself, her reaction when nobody listens. At the same time, something entirely different can also be seen: life. Everyone is alive. Every conversation, every gesture, every sound, screams life and the joy of living. All those little conversations we hear there – and I suspect she hears them too – are concerned with the everydayness of life. Precisely the thing she is now so afraid of losing.

Her vanity, her fear, life, death, come together in this way. She moves through the café completely unseen, as though she were already dead. And when she leaves it, two women simply continue talking: there is a life before she enters, during her presence and after she leaves, and it does not revolve around her.

Outside, the urban sounds of Paris have disappeared. The looks of passers-by remain, and we hear footsteps, Cléo’s. An Asian-looking woman carrying a baguette looks at her as she walks past; two older Parisian women look too. Then memories: Cléo thinks of the man who was just talking about Algeria, the way he looked at her – so she was seen after all. But for what? Her beauty? Then the gaze of the tarot reader, full of compassion. Then three women in glasses observing her. Meanwhile the entire city has fallen silent, except for those heels on the pavement: heel after heel we hear them. A moustached man looks at her. Two men smoking.

Cléo crosses a square. Another clock in view, 6.00 p.m. now. As though even Paris is keeping time. Another half-hour Cléo can live; perhaps her last in the innocence of the healthy. She flees to a friend who poses naked for sculptors. Free. Happy with her body, with her life, with a boyfriend whom she loves and who loves her and is waiting for her at the cinema, Le Delambre, which he runs and to which she has to bring a film. For the second, but not the last, time we ride through Paris with Cléo in a car. There they watch a silent film of a few minutes with Jean-Luc Godard. As they leave, Cléo’s friend drops her handbag; everything falls out and one thing breaks: her little mirror.

For the third time, then, we have the mirror. First clear, reflecting Cléo’s beauty (or vanity?), the second time in the Chinese restaurant and covered with painted characters, now the mirror is broken. A sign of bad luck for Cléo, a bad omen: death is now almost unavoidable. But it means something else too. We have watched her move from concealed, mythical, bewigged and coinciding with her beauty and the hope that beauty could ward off death. More and more space has opened up between herself and her beauty, the possibility that perhaps she is not the centre of the world, that perhaps she is more than or different from her beauty. Now the mirror breaks, now the shield has been pulled away, now her self emerges: now something can happen, perhaps.

The friends take a taxi; for the last time we travel through the city. When her friend says goodbye to Cléo, the taxi drives on and Cléo asks the driver to enter a park – Parc Montsouris. People jump aside, but he calmly continues until Cléo tells him to stop. She pays, gets out, walks down a flight of steps and sings. For no one. For herself. On a bridge she stops and looks at a waterfall. A man approaches, he speaks to her, she responds. He sees her from behind when he addresses her – the energy in the way she stands there, his loneliness, her posture, there is a reason he seeks contact, but here it is not that damned beauty that has stood so much in her way. And now that the third mirror has broken, she can for the first time truly be addressed.

They chat, they talk about the silence in the park, the absence of the children who have gone to look at a pond. Cléo remarks that there is plenty of water here too. Yes, says Antoine, the man who approached her, but “things are much more fun.” When she says she finds it funny that he knows all this, he says that he is curious.

Antoine looks at the world, looks at her, with an open attitude: he allows it to appear to him rather than wanting to appropriate it. José wanted to refresh himself with her beauty, but he was not curious.

It is the first day of summer, we only discover now, it is the longest day. What does the longest day mean? Life: for 364 days the earth will not know as much light as on this one day. Or does it mean the end of life: from here the days grow shorter, the high point has passed.

Antoine is on leave from the war in Algeria. Tonight he has to return. Like Cléo, he too stands in the face of death. A final moment of rest, of peace, of silence in the park until he has to return to a war.

Perhaps he felt it; perhaps he approached Cléo as she looked at the waterfall not because she was so beautiful, not because she was a semi-famous singer, but because he sensed that a bond of fate existed between them: a shared mortality anxiously present for both.

What a different Cléo we have here: no more hysteria, no panic, no coquetry. In a quiet, subdued voice she tells him that she is fearful by nature: needles, storms, lifts, birds – and now this great fear of death.

After a conversation about love – Antoine says he would rather die for a woman than for a country, but that there is no woman who allows herself to be grasped enough to make him want to die for her, Cléo’s agreement, her understanding that she too has never wanted to allow herself to be entirely grasped – they leave for the hospital. During this walk we also discover that Cléo is short for Cleopatra and that it is not her real name at all: her name is Florence.

To give something a name is to take it out of indeterminacy. In Genesis, Adam does not bring the animals into existence, but by naming them gives each a place in his world. Now Cléo finally speaks her own name: Florence. She no longer allows herself to be encountered as the apparition others have made of her – and that she made of herself.

When they arrive at the hospital, the doctor is not at his post. They sit down on a bench and wonder what to do now. Then a convertible arrives, stops, it is the doctor and almost in passing he announces, as though saying that it will rain tomorrow, oh yes, you have stomach cancer, but two months of radiotherapy and it should be sorted out. Intense, but it will be all right, and he drives away.

“I’m sorry I have to leave. I would like to stay with you,” Antoine says.

“You are,” Florence replies. “I think my fear is gone. I think I’m happy.”

VII

Alain finds no Antoine in Paris. He visits friends, ex-lovers, partygoers, he drinks; he sees countless ways of living, but nowhere a life that still seems to be meant for him. And he is allowed to drink: after all, tomorrow is 23 July.

In his room he wakes up exactly as someone who has been drinking wakes up. Hungover. Entirely ordinary. He begins shaving in front of the mirror, which has remained intact and on which 23 July is still written in large black marker, circled. He packs his suitcase while still wearing his pyjamas. Makes a few calls. Smokes. Gets dressed. He puts on his reading glasses and picks up a book: F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby. In Drieu la Rochelle’s novel, Alain reads an insignificant detective novel. Malle therefore wants something from this. Both Gatsby and Alain live in an idealised past which, for a time, they believed could become the future again; for both, this ultimately proves impossible – and that impossibility eventually robs them of any remaining ability to act, to love or to imagine a future. Any hope.

How do you spend your final morning: why would you read when, really, you read because you are building a life, developing a taste, wanting to know something. Why shave yourself when you know you will never leave the room again?

He places his reading glasses on the book. Picks up the pistol lying beside it. The buttons of his shirt are open far enough for him to place the barrel of the pistol against the skin of his chest, behind which lies his heart. A look into the camera – tormented, frightened, determined, but never relieved – then we see two thumbs, one of them around the trigger: he fires.

Then the final words appear on screen, his tormented face still behind them:

I kill myself because you did not love me,

because I did not love you.

I kill myself because we were cowards towards one another —

to tighten our bonds forever.

I shall leave an indelible stain upon you.

Something striking happens here. In the novel, these words appear earlier, in Alain’s inner monologue, when he takes heroin during a party. There they are more a reflection on suicide as a final act of connection. Malle lifts them out of the narrative and lays them over Alain’s dead face. In the novel, they are followed by:

I know very well that one lives on better in the memory of one’s friends dead than alive. You did not think of me — well then, you will never forget me.

In Drieu la Rochelle’s novel, the suicide follows a final rejection. Alain runs upstairs and seizes upon his death as a final act of control: now he will finally act, finally be a man. “I am a man. I am the master of my own life and I shall prove it. (...) Chest thrust forward, bare, completely exposed because he knows where his heart is. A revolver is solid, it is made of steel. It is an object. Finally to come into contact with an object.” Malle strips that ending of its bitter heroism. His Alain tidies his room, finishes The Great Gatsby and then calmly carries out the decision that has been written on his mirror all along.

Florence has death announced to her and discovers that she can live – and oh, how desperately she wants to live. Death ultimately becomes a liberation for her because she learns to cast off all the vanities and insincerities that offer no protection against death and fear, and finds Antoine. Florence, who is no longer Cléo, has always wanted to live and only now can truly learn how to live. Alain has not wanted to live for all this time, has even written death down, and makes sure that nothing can surprise him anymore. Her fear does not disappear because she turns out to be healthy, she has cancer, but because she no longer stands alone before death. Alain is surrounded by people, but can no longer experience their presence.

In the end, both have received what they were searching for. Cléo receives no certainty about her future, but presence in the present. Alain receives the silence he longed for. The same city has carried them; one back towards life, the other all the way to death.