It is both much too big and way too small to describe Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s gorgeously allusive “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” as a biopic. The impulse behind the film — to re-write this remarkable woman back into the French and Caribbean cultural histories that have long neglected her in favor of her famous politician husband, Aimé Césaire — is standard-issue biopic fuel. 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.
“Here we are, making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, boldly breaking the fourth wall. She plays Suzanne — a beautiful woman in red lipstick, smoking and swaying to swing records playing on the gramophone — but she also plays a riff on herself,...
“Here we are, making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, boldly breaking the fourth wall. She plays Suzanne — a beautiful woman in red lipstick, smoking and swaying to swing records playing on the gramophone — but she also plays a riff on herself,...
- 1/31/2024
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Casting a non-actor in a lead role is always dicey. At best, it can bring a certain freshness to the screen while leaving the audience unburdened by any associations with prior movies. But when it doesn't work, as in the fatally unconvincing lead performance of Adrian Mancinelli in Dino J. Gallina's Red Tide, it can prove disastrous. Mancinelli stars as Alex Nikoladis, a newly released convict, returning to his maritime Florida hometown and hoping to go straight by pursuing a life as a sponge diver. But his plans are frustrated when he comes to live with his brother, John (Josué Gutierrez), who is not only working for a drug dealer and struggling with an Oxycontin addiction but has also managed to lose the family boat. Alex's efforts to get his brother sober and to make a...
- 7/24/2013
- Village Voice
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