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‘The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’ Review: An Intoxicating Reverie Reclaims an Elusive Legacy
Artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's feature debut "The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire" is a shimmering arthouse tribute to the overlooked Martinican writer.
But Hunt-Ehrlich complicates and prevaricates on that impulse in increasingly provocative and hypnotic ways, delivering a woozily metatextual essay that lives inside the mystery of Césaire’s tiny but influential corpus of work, rather than trying to solve it. Hunt-Ehrlich reconciles these contradictions by layering the making of her film — in which even the clapper loader seems to have fallen under Césaire’s spell — over snatches from her essays and letters, which in turn melt into evocatively recreated scenes of a trip Breton (Josué Gutierrez) made to Martinique to visit Suzanne and Aimé (Motell Foster) during the war. The soundtrack, too, is an exemplary collaboration between Andrew Tracy’s sound design and Sabine McCalla’s music — from the subtle crackle of an old-timey recording giving way to the shifting beat of drummers gathered in the shade, to the drowsy insect buzz of the humid Antillean air being replaced by female voices harmonising a traditional Creole folksong — one that, incidentally, invokes the Haitian goddess of revolution and mistreated women.
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