In Cleo From 5 to 7, a woman in love with her own image has to face her biggest fear: the disappearance of it.
Cleo's struggle to confirm her existence is also a struggle to confirm the validity of her fears. Because of her attractive appearance, Cleo is spoiled rotten by her maid, loved only physically by her absent lover, and leered at by unknown men. Whether it is seen in the way she is treated or imagined in her state of paranoia, when people see Cleo, they see a "capricious" woman who is not to be taken seriously solely because of her looks. No matter where she goes, she is constantly staring at herself in mirrors not out of vanity but to convince herself that she is a real person, not dead yet, and not simply a fragile girl or an object for men - she is a woman.
Her treatment is laid out by Cleo's friend Dorothee -- "they're looking at more than just me. A shape, an idea. It's as if I wasn't there". The fact that these words come from Dorothee show that Cleo's fears are not just her own, nor are they that misguided. While the abstraction of this universal experience into a beautiful pop singer's point of view might be hard for some women to immediately relate to at first, Varda's slow unraveling of Cleo as more than a spoiled princess reveals her mindset to be uncomfortably relatable. I think every woman can relate to constantly being told their fears are made-up and being talked down to solely because of their appearance.
The scene where Cleo puts on one of her own songs and wanders throughout a cafe, constantly flitting her head and moving from chair to chair, listening to other people's conversations and (non-)reactions to her music, is one of the best depictions of anxiety I've seen on film. Trapped inside her own head, she needs some kind of connection to the people she's alienated from to convince herself she is real, but is too afraid to reach out.
The same goes for the segment after this, where she walks around Paris in a state of paranoia and has to deal with the real and imagined eyes on her, judging her as she walks proudly through the city. I saw myself too vividly in both of these sequences, two seemingly opposite states of alienation from your surroundings where the former is a disoriented, almost out-of-body experience where you feel like you don't exist and the latter is an alert, performative state marked by imagining everyone around staring at you.
Cleo's salvation is foreshadowed in a charming short (featuring a "HOLY SHIT IS THAT GODARD?"-worthy cameo by the man himself) that shows how with a certain perspective, one's fears are self-fulfilling. When the dark sunglasses come off, Anna Karina's broken doll of a woman is actually fine. The same change happens after Cleo's encounter with a man facing a similar existential crisis, who sees her for what she is instead of projecting his own desires and expectations on her. In his presence, knowing she is not alone in her anxieties, Cleo learns to relax and live in the moment instead of worrying about her death. Even though she finally finds peace in her world, the end is melancholy (as her supposedly-imminent death vanishes, Antoine is on a journey to face his own) -- but just as beautiful as Cleo herself.