So Agnès Varda is maybe one of the most important directors who didn’t make that top 100 list (despite being one of the big French New Wave directors, and like a half dozen of those being on there), so this, her first big feature film, was on my post-list queue (especially after I listened to an interview with her — she’s 89 and still out there making new stuff).

So! The titular Cléo is a mildly famous pop star, and the movie follows her for two hours one evening as she waits to get the results of a medical test. (The movie’s not quite in real-time, but it’s awfully close.) As the movie starts, we see her at a fortune-teller, getting a not-so-great fortune. We then follow her to a cafe (where most of the focus is on snippets of overheard conversation from other tables); she meets a friend and is all weepily melodramatic; they go hat shopping; they go back to her house, and after a perfunctory chaste visit from her lover, her music biz partners come over to propose new songs to her, at which she gets all weepily melodramatic again. (None of her acquaintances take her at all seriously through this, because apparently weepy melodrama is kind of her standard affect.)

She huffs off, goes to another cafe, meets up with another friend (who is just finishing up her job as a nude model for sculptors), goes and watches a short silent film (with a cameo from Godard as the Buster Keaton-like protagonist), takes a taxi ride to drop her friend off, and then goes to a park.

So far, this has been a fairly solitary film — even though Cléo is meeting people, her interactions are largely superficial, and she feels alone — but in the park she meets up with a soldier on leave from the war in Algeria, who has to hop a train later in the evening to go back to the fighting. And for whatever reason — maybe because they both have their mortality kind of in front of their minds — they hit it off, and sort of talk non-stop for a while, and he goes to the hospital with her to get her results, and (as she says explicitly), she’s no longer so terrified and melodramatic about it, but is actually sort of relaxed and happy.

So the movie is generally regarded as a) a kind of existentialist meditation, and also b) sort of a tour of 1960s Paris. It seems to do both of those well, while also having a certain stylistic verve — New Wave-y for sure, even down to the jump cuts, but more composed and polished. There’s not a lot of narrative momentum here, but also the movie’s only 90 minutes long, so its episodic nature (called out with explicit “chapter” markers throughout the film) works for it.