NYFF '24: “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” sings an unusual song

by Nick Taylor

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire presents the most concrete details about Suzanne Césaire's life - perhaps the only concrete details about her life - in its opening title cards. Born in 1915 in Martinique, Césaire was a poet and essayist who began publishing her essays in 1941. Her work was heavily influenced by feminism, communism, and anti-colonial theory, and she achieved a degree of sociocultural prominence before 1946 when she vanished from the literary circles she'd held so dear. One character, an actress playing Césaire in a film about her life, wisely notes, "We're making a movie about a woman who didn't want to be known." And this sentiment informs this thesis in a nutshell. To compensate, director Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich has nestled her work in a metafictional story around a largely fictionalized treatise on Césaire. It's a strange proposition, but is it an effective one? Let's talk about it...

In a very real sense, critiquing The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire as executed feels slightly unproductive to me. Hunt-Ehrlich's direction is so assured I never questioned if she'd created the film she set out to make. Costumes, makeup, and sets distill period detail without qualifying as immersive. Elliptical editing patterns go even further to blur the lines between fiction and reality, not just between scenes but within them. Rather than that, I wondered how much weight those intentions really held. But mostly I spent The Ballad reflecting on my own cinematic desires, on the formal and thematic ambitions that connect with me as a viewer. In theory, I'm completely intrigued by Hunt-Ehrlich's goals for her film in interviews and the discussions around it being made by more enthusiastic viewers. I don't think biopics are required to "teach" audiences about their protagonists or honor historical fidelity to a unique degree compared to other narrative and documentary features.

To this end, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire tells two stories: one about a pseudo-love triangle between Césaire, her husband, and an attractive philosophical companion, and another about the actress playing her (Zita Hanrot). Either this episode of Césaire's life predates her most active periods as a writer, or the film simply eschews a belabored focus on her as an artist while still paying fealty to her as a thinker and a flesh-and-blood human being. If Hunt-Ehrlich's ultimate objective was to evocatively speculate on Césaire's life in such a way that her audiences would be inspired to look her up, more power to her because that's exactly what I did. Still, I had a similar reaction to this as I did to bluish, where a welcome prioritization of mood and milieu over narrative detail falters under the sheer thinness of the story those images are telling.

The metafiction plotline about a crew making the film we're watching never materializes into a real point of interest. The Ballad would benefit equally from cutting the premise entirely or expanding upon how Hanrot relates to the woman she's portraying. Several scenes depict the actress reading Césaire's writings while a nearby nanny tends to Henrot's three-month-old child. What she gleans from these works isn't specified, even as the quality and attention of her gaze suggest a smart woman enraptured by a forgotten author. It's either an intriguing gap or an unexplored potential that more hay isn't made about the maternal parallels between these women. One reason historians speculate for Césaire's sudden retirement is that she focused entirely on raising her six children while her husband became a politician of world-scale significance. Now, she's being interpreted by an artist with far more freedom to pursue her career than she ever did.

I admire Hunt-Ehrlich's decision to not take more well-worn routes to narrativize Césaire's life. Maybe it seemed like a betrayal to comport her life into pedestrian struggles, and the only way forward was to embrace her anti-colonial practices and put them to cinematic ends. But my admiration for The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is more about negative space, where I respect the gutsiness of Hunt-Ehrlich's choices without getting a lot out of the film itself. I would have liked a better sense of Césaire as a person, a thinker, an artist. Hunt-Ehrlich's and Hanrot transmit a strong impression of her fierceness and intellect, but it's just not tangible enough to hang a movie on. 

What does work, consistently and vividly, is Alex Ashe's cinematography. The nighttime opening scene has such a humid, dreamy quality that it helps establish and justify The Ballad's blending of realities as it progresses. He's a wizard at finding so many shades of orange to natural brilliance, making Martinique into a land of bold colors and heavenly light. Most importantly, Ashe is flattering to the skin tones of the three principal actors, all of whom are clearly gorgeous but seem to bend and radiate light at different moments. Andrew Tracy's sound design is similarly dexterous at balancing the film's grounded and heightened facets. These elements can't paper over what strikes me as under-conceived in The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, but they help it achieve such an intriguing mood that I was happy to follow it to the very end.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is playing in the 62nd New York Film Festival's Currents section.