The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is a dazzling, endlessly creative feature film directorial debut from Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.
Writer & Director: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Genre: Biopic, Drama
Run Time: 75′
TIFF Screening: September 10-12, 2024
Future Festival Screenings: October 17, 2024 at the BFI London Film Festival
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
How do you make a film about a person who didn’t want to be remembered? This is a question that The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire sets out to answer and succeeds in doing so. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature film is inevitably as elusive and enigmatic as the titular woman it depicts: writer Suzanne Césaire, who despite only publishing works for four years became a leading figure of the Négritude and Surrealist movements in Martinique. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is surprisingly short—it runs for only 65 minutes before the credits roll—but never does this briefness or indefinability cause the film to be redundant in any way.
Hunt-Ehrlich’s feature captures this legendary figure in the best and only way possible.
Part docudrama, part anti-biopic, part experimental immersion-breaking visual poem, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire follows an actress (Zita Hanrot, Fatima) as she starts to enter the role of Césaire. Alongside an actor playing Suzanne’s husband Aimé (Motell Foster, La Cocina), famed Surrealist André Breton (Josué Gutierrez, Bloodline), and other cast and crew members, Hanrot looks in-depth at the life and writings of Césaire. The concept sounds confusing on paper, but on film—vivid, crackling 16mm to be precise—it is surprisingly easy to follow, and flows with ease between narrative fiction and abstract metatextual reflections.
The parallels between Hanrot’s actress character and Suzanne are several: mainly the fact that the actress is a new mother, and Suzanne herself had six children. Suzanne and Aimé, who himself was a figure in French politics for many years, raised their family in the mid-twentieth century in Martinique, at a time when the pro-Nazi Vichy government of France controlled the country. In turn, many of Suzanne’s writings reflect on anti-colonial subjects; both her and her husband distributed dissident writings throughout the city on limited paper rations.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire gives us small, searching snippets of these works, but Hunt-Ehrlich impressively links the words we are hearing directly to the landscape, the history of not just Suzanne but Martinique and its colonisation embedded deeply into the environment. A recurring image of papers—presumably some of Suzanne’s writings—as they blow away slowly in the sunny breeze is just one of many moments of intense symbolism. As Hunt-Ehrlich continues to revisit this image, which seems to organically follow the free-moving papers, we are guided on this unknowable, mesmerising journey alongside the psyche of Suzanne Césaire. Musings from cast or crew members similarly interlink to the environment, with the buzz of nature undercut by voiceovers.
More haunting, memorable scenes follow: Hanrot, Foster, and Gutierrez stagger around blindfolded in a field; blood runs over blades of grass. Hunt-Ehrlich’s background in visual art shines through in The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire; this film is her feature debut, but she has already made other experimental films that have been screened at festivals. Endlessly symbolic, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire doesn’t so much as rigidly pick apart Suzanne’s life, but more highlights how difficult it is to do so to such a historical figure. We can’t get to know her in the deepest way, but we can get a sense of who she was, the struggles she faced, and the power of her work. The film flows with a careful, poetic and elegant rhythm, with all the metatextual elegance of a Abbas Kiarostami film and all the soul-searching, existential reflections of a Terrence Malick one.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is the kind of film that challenges traditional notions of cinema as an art form. As Hanrot posits at one point, it seems Suzanne Césaire did not want herself or her work to be remembered. By following this reluctance and inevitable mystery that comes with it, Hunt-Ehrlich creates something that is daring in its ambiguity, striking in its lack of clear answers about its subject, and unforgettable in how it challenges the classical concepts of biopic, documentary, and historical drama filmmaking.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire was screened at TIFF on September 10-12, 2024 and will have its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17, 2024.
