A watch doesn't measure time; it measures our obsession with it. Ninety minutes, an hour and a half, can be a trifle or an eternity. For Florence, who calls herself Cléo Victoire, they are the exact, cruel duration of a personal apocalypse. Agnès Varda, with the precision of an existentialist watchmaker and the soul of a street poet, does not simply film this interval of waiting; she sculpts it, expands it, and contracts it, transforming "Cléo from 5 to 7" into a seismograph of the soul, recording every tremor of an identity in fragments. The film is a masterpiece of chronometered humanity, an elegy to a fragility masquerading as spectacle.

At the beginning, Cléo is an image, a construct. A blonde doll, a yé-yé singer of moderate success, a body to be exhibited, a face onto which desires are projected. She is defined entirely by the gaze of others: that of her absent, paternalistic lover, who calls her "my little pearl"; that of her caring but suffocating housekeeper; that of the strangers on the street, who recognize her and consume her with their eyes. Varda orchestrates a symphony of mirrors and shop windows, reflective surfaces in which Cléo constantly seeks her own effigy, not out of vanity, but for desperate reassurance. The sequence in the hat shop is an essay in cinematic semiotics: each hat is a mask, a potential identity to be worn to hide the naked terror of mortality. Cléo isn't looking at herself; she is verifying that she still exists. She is the perfect embodiment of the Sartrean concept of "Le Regard"—the Gaze of the Other that objectifies us, that steals our being-for-ourselves to transform us into a being-for-others. Until a cancer diagnosis hangs over her head like a guillotine, this state of being is enough for her. Now, no longer.

Her wanderings through Paris, which occupy the film's beating heart, are a descent into the real world that is uncannily reminiscent of a page from Virginia Woolf. If Mrs. Dalloway turned a walk through the streets of London into a map of consciousness, Varda does the same with Cléo and the Paris of 1961. But where Woolf plumbed the past, Varda films an absolute, almost documentary present. Her Paris is not the romantic postcard of a Hollywood on the Seine; it is a teeming, cacophonous, indifferent organism. It is the Paris of the Algerian War, news of which filters through café radios, a collective memento mori that counterpoints Cléo's private fear. Street performers swallowing frogs, delivery boys running, couples arguing: life goes on, absurd and magnificent, while she already feels like a ghost. This blend of interior, almost solipsistic drama and the technique of cinéma-vérité is Varda's stroke of genius, elevating the film above its Nouvelle Vague contemporaries. While Godard deconstructed film language with intellectual cynicism and Truffaut filled it with lyrical nostalgia, Varda used it as an instrument of radical empathy.

The film, with its rigorous temporal structure, could be seen as a spiritual ancestor to works like Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, but where Tykwer plays with the possibilities of fate, Varda focuses on the ineluctability of the human condition. There is only one path: forward, toward seven o'clock. And on this path, Cléo must strip herself bare. Literally and metaphorically. The cathartic moment arrives when, in her apartment, she removes her showy blonde wig, revealing her short, dark hair. It is an act of surrender and, simultaneously, of liberation. Immediately after, she sings "Sans Toi," a melancholic and heartbreaking song. Before her songwriters (among them a young Michel Legrand, composer of the sublime score), her performance is no longer that of the poupée qui chante. It is her true self emerging, a lament that transforms artifice into pure art. From that moment on, Cléo stops being looked at and starts to look.

This reversal of the gaze dynamic is fundamental. Her path leads her to a cinema, where she watches a surreal, comedic short film (a small meta-textual gem featuring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina joking about death and dark glasses). It's the Nouvelle Vague winking at itself, a Brechtian interruption that reminds us of cinema's fiction but which, paradoxically, amplifies Cléo's emotional reality. Emerging from the dark theatre, her perception of the world has changed. She no longer seeks her reflection; she observes the faces, the details, the silent stories of the city. She has become a flâneuse, an urban explorer in the most Baudelairian sense of the term, but with a uniquely feminine sensibility.

The final encounter in the Parc Montsouris with Antoine, a soldier on leave about to depart for Algeria, is the perfect conclusion to this transformative journey. It is the meeting of two solitudes confronting death. He, with the violent and senseless death of war; she, with the biological and intimate death of illness. For the first time, Cléo is not an object of desire or pity. She is a person. Antoine doesn't know her as "Cléo Victoire," the singer. He sees her for what she is: a frightened woman learning to be brave. Their conversation is free of artifice, a dialogue between two naked souls that anticipates, by thirty years, the wandering chemistry of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. There is no seduction, only connection. He offers her his company, his time, and in this selfless exchange, Cléo finds a peace that neither lovers nor mirrors could give her. He teaches her to see the beauty in a weeping willow, to find meaning in the simple act of walking together.

When they finally arrive at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for the verdict, the outcome almost no longer matters. "I don't think I'm afraid anymore," she says. The diagnosis, which the doctor delivers hurriedly before leaving, is almost an afterthought. In those ninety minutes, Cléo has gone from being an object terrified of her own end to a subject who has learned to inhabit her own present. She has traversed her own personal "garden of forking paths," to borrow from Borges, and has chosen the only possible path: that of awareness.

"Cléo from 5 to 7" is not merely a film about the fear of death. It is a film about learning how to live. It is a feminist treatise written before second-wave feminism even had its lexicon. It is a historical document of a Paris that no longer exists. But above all, it is pure cinema, a work in which the time on the clock and the time of the soul perfectly coincide, leaving us with the profound and indelible feeling of having witnessed not the chronicle of a death foretold, but the chronicle of a birth. A birth into true life, one that begins precisely when one accepts the possibility of its end. And that, more than anything else, is the mark of an immortal masterpiece.