If anything feels right in “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire,” it’s the fact that it takes a while to settle in for as comfortable as it should be in Martinique where the French activist and author should feel at home in the country where she was born, particularly with the verdant scenery and the calming sound of the tide rolling in. But there’s an unease baked into Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s bewitching snapshot from Césaire’s life lived in exile, having to live at a remove from society when her seemingly radical political ideas have literally left her on her own island but she can appear stranded even within the parameters of her garden when her husband Aimé can look similarly adrift.
Save for an opening title card that mentions the seven essays that she published between 1941-1945 for the journal Tropiques that the film draws passages from while she and Aimé were living in Martinique, prevented from moving freely when the island was subject to a blockade by the Allied Forces during World War II, “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” provides little in the way of context for those unfamiliar, but an air of mystery becomes a crucial component of the film not only to lend intrigue to the proceedings, but for Hunt-Ehrlich to get her arms around a subject that sought to remove herself from a public narrative, not published again for the last two decades of her life and burning much of archive.
“We’re making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” Zita Hanrot, the actress hired to play Césaire, says plainly to the camera not long after the film’s begun and her skepticism is indicative of the film’s overall approach where what can hold truth are the words that Césaire originally wrote and Hanrot recites throughout, but Hunt-Ehrlich cleverly exposes the reality surrounding them, even in the present tense. Gradually inserting scenes of the production itself of a key grip reading the history of Martinique on the back of a truck and notices of filming that have been put up around the area, the director makes the act of storytelling around Cesaire part of her isolation.
Free to explore the world of possibility that can exist in the mind and even commit those thoughts to paper, Césaire could be disillusioned by how far they might actually be able to travel and while Hunt-Ehrlich surely could be uncomfortable with making too strong an assumption about why she ultimately decided against continuing her work or encouraging it from living on, the film makes the self-doubt tactile that can contribute to worthy voices being excluded from history with the uncertainty that it ultimately has any value as the film contends with authenticity to Césaire’s experience and Césaire has no idea what reach her ideas will have. The mere fact that “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” exists at all, of course, is a testament to the influence she had, resetting the conversation around French colonialism and cultivating other Caribbean voices in the pages around her own work in Tropiques, but it depicts a lonely existence with no one to confide in.
The film honors the author’s fervent belief in surrealism as it finds Hanrot carrying around a tortured legacy, wandering around Martinique in a series of encounters that engage both the actor’s history — she’s a new mother with a child to care for — and Césaire’s, never looking entirely comfortable as a wife and a mother, particularly when Aimé has a far greater reputation as a scholar with few of the concerns she has to bear as the woman of the house. An opening scene of Césaire dancing in a separate frame from her husband on the beach at night becomes a haunting introduction for the film to come when it can summon both paradise and alienation at the same time and in a place where life can look a lot simpler, the film teases out the complexities of Césaire feeling as if she has to accommodate rather than challenge it with a fierce intellect made clear in her writing. At times, “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” seems to be grappling with a similar question when it comes to its own pace, having a relaxed formal presentation where things could be a little too obscured by its reserved nature, but that seems to be a small price to pay to place you so firmly in Césaire’s headspace at a critical period in her life, one in which it may not have appeared like anything at all was going on, but to overlook it would be to miss everything.
“The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next play at the New York Film Festival at the Eleanor Bunin Monroe Film Center on September 28th at 5:45 pm, September 29th at noon and October 4th at 12:15 pm, as well as at the BAM Rose Cinemas on October 6th at 4 pm.