“A calm, measured piece of art that oozes a warmth not only for its main subject but for her political activism and sharp writing as well.”

“Surrealism, the tightrope of our hope”

Very few films exist in that hard-to-pin-down space between essay, documentary, and biopic. The probable reason being that it is difficult to pull off. American visual artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich manages to do it in her debut feature, if feature is what we can call this, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. In this peculiar portrait of a little known Afro-Surrealist and anti-colonialist writer, Hunt-Ehrlich isn’t afraid to let the filmmaking process itself bleed into the film, as fourth-wall breaking abounds, and the actress playing the titular writer addresses not just said writer’s children but also her own on set. A small film aimed at a niche audience, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is for lovers of the contemplative and the poetic only, but gives good insight into the attitude of the intelligentsia towards their colonizers in the French colonies in the mid-20th century.

Suzanne Césaire was born in 1915 in Martinique, an overseas department of France. In the late ’30s she moved to Toulouse to study, and later to Paris, where she met her future husband Aimé Césaire. Aimé, a poet and writer himself, would go on to serve in the French National Assembly for almost 50 years after the war. After their marriage they returned to Martinique though, and between 1941 and 1945 Suzanne wrote seven essays that were published in the cultural journal Tropiques, founded by the Césaires. Barring a few letters, these essays are the only work that remains by Suzanne Césaire. Not because she quit writing, but because she would rip up her work, deliberately, after finishing it. “We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Hunt-Ehrlich in voice over.

It is the form of The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire that makes it a challenging work. Césaire’s story comes in fragments, both in terms of her life and her essays, which the actress Zita Hanrot, who plays her, reads in voice over or directly to the camera. We see her interactions with her husband, played by Motell Foster, often wordless; or the arrival of their friend André Breton (Josué Gutierrez), with whom Suzanne developed a good relationship and who led her into Afro-Surrealism. None of this is told in a straightforward way as any run-of-the-mill biopic would do. It often uses allusion, eschewing a narrative in favor of an essayist approach that draws us deeper into Césaire’s work but makes us none the wiser about the woman herself. What stands out most is her disdain for the Vichy government ruling France in this time period, which prevents her from returning to her adopted country.

And thus we stay on the island, its lush greens rendered in gorgeous 16mm through Alex Ashe’s camera, each shot carefully composed and blocked. Add in an unobtrusive yet piercing soundscape designed by Andrew Tracy, full of buzzing insects and rustling palm trees combined with the sounds of mid-century modernity like a record player, and The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire becomes a calm, measured piece of art that oozes a warmth not only for its main subject but for her political activism and sharp writing as well. “If Proust had been a Martinique farm worker I doubt he would have written In Search of Lost Time,” muses Hanrot, signaling Césaire’s rejection of France’s colonialist ways and a keen understanding of the social divide between white and black even for intellectuals like herself and her husband Aimé. For a woman who didn’t want to be remembered, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire makes a pretty good case for the mark she has left. Most people won’t know her name, and the film to some extent tries to rectify that even if in a cerebral, elusive, and decidedly non-narrative manner, but her influence still reverberates.