Cléo from 5 to 7

Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962) is Agnès Varda's landmark French drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Shot largely in real time across a single summer afternoon in Paris, the film follows a young pop singer named Cléo as she waits for biopsy results that may confirm cancer. Varda brought it to Cannes competition that same year, and it became one of the defining works of the French New Wave.

Cléo drifts through the city — cafés, a hat shop, a recording studio, the Luxembourg Gardens — while the rest of Paris hums along indifferently. Radio bulletins mention the Algerian War. Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina appear briefly in a silent comic interlude. Then, near the end of her walk, she meets a soldier who is days away from shipping out, and their conversation quietly reframes every anxiety the film has been accumulating.

Varda built the whole thing around the tension between how women are looked at and how they see themselves — a question that ages better every decade. Michel Legrand wrote the score. The film runs 90 minutes and covers roughly that same span of actual time, which is a structural choice that makes the wait feel genuinely felt rather than performed. Stream Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) online on iFILM.