Cleo from 5 to 7

 

Cleo from 5 to 7 aka Cleo de 5 a 7 by Agnes Varda, nominated for The Palme D’Or at The Cannes Film Festival in 1962

9 out of 10

 

 

Cleo Victoire is trying to find about her future at the beginning of this motion picture, when she consults a clairvoyant, or maybe we should call her a charlatan, depending on how we see zodiac signs, prophets, Scientology, and other such beliefs in the supernatural, unexplained, futurology and the like…

 

Let me just say that the film is different, acclaimed, original, black and white, but not overwhelming, if you ask me, before I move to other, unrelated, but way more important things, such as my own experiences…

Mircea Cartarescu is probably the best writer we have http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/12/irish-cream-by-mircea-cartarescu.html he has been awarded recently a Californian literary prize and he talked on TVR Cultural about the difference between say a German critic and American ones, who are more creative…

 

However, American critics have a tendency (is it more than that, a habit, do they always do this, I do not know, but doubts it) to veer off from the book they are supposed to analyze and talk about them and their thoughts…

In the same manner, Andrei Plesu http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/05/obscenitatea-publica-by-andrei-plesu.html who is our greatest thinker in my view (and that of multitudes) speaks about the ways to present the weather forecast, how various presenters say ‘you want to know if it rains, let me tell you first about what I think of the latest political developments, leaving viewers baffled and in the dark

 

Following the aforementioned pattern, if you want to find anything about Cleo, never mind about her between five and seven, you had better look elsewhere, for this is where I will write about what I found in the cards…

In the Days of Wine and Roses http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/08/days-of-wine-and-roses-written-by-jp.html I used to visit the dormitory near the Opera, where the female (in our times, we need to use persons, or vagina endowed, birthing individuals, because gender has new interpretations I gather) students stayed

 

Girl, Woman, Other http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/girl-woman-other-by-bernardine-evaristo.html by Bernardine Evaristo is the Co-Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and it explains about ‘gender being a big lie of civilization’, ‘two spirits, non-gender, gender fluidity, notions that are new to me…

 

Nonetheless, back in the 1980s, during one visit at the Opera dormitory, one of the students there offered to read in the cards (though not tarot) and the details she revealed have been extraordinary, in that I had had no idea that my cousin (and friend back then, now he is in Argentina, and we are just ‘Facebook friends’, which does not amount to much, if anything) had had some experiences, connection revealed by this ‘card reader’.

Another time, I had gone to see my father, Puiu, who had been hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver (chronic, deadly disease, specific to heavy drinkers, only he was a teetotaler) at Fundeni, where we would spend some time in his ‘salon’, somewhere on the fifth floor and then I would depart, to continue my practice

 

But on this day, as I was waiting for the bus and he was waving at me, from the balcony, which had a view over the street, from where he could see me waiting, I thought I have a premonition, that this is the last time I would see him, and then this is what happened, it was the last time, for he would die soon.

Cleo thinks she will die, she has something terminal (just like her tarot cards reader was convinced) only she is very young and unlikely to be so near death, while in the case of my father, it had been a few years of suffering and treatment, and thus what I took for ‘seeing into the future’ could well be dismissed as just assessing the situation, and thinking of the likely outcome of an illness that is deadly and could bring the end…

 

What happens in situations like these is that we engage in self-fulfilling prophecies, indeed, if we are gloomy, then our chances to live longer are diminished – positive psychology studies have demonstrated that – Martin Seligman is the co-founder of this science and author of superb books http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/11/flourish-by-martin-seligman-i-ii.html that offer happiness rules and formulas.

One such is PERMA aka Positive Emotions, Engagement or Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html Relationships, Meaning and Achievement as quintessential for our wellbeing, if we think we are going to die soon, then we enter a state of negativity and that will fasten our decline and eventually, it will end up killing us

 

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world  – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, opehttp://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html n the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is