Certain, but Not Final

Winnie Wang reviews Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s debut feature “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.”

By Winnie WangAugust 25, 2025

• Film

• Biography & Autobiography

IN THE OPENING of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s debut feature The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), we are introduced to the film’s three central figures in a terrace café via a tableau of silent glances. They lounge by palm trees and string lights at nightfall, observing their surroundings and one another. Patrons sway in each other’s arms to music, drifting from a gramophone, that casts a dreamlike spell over the setting. Moments later, a voice from the edge of the frame calling “cut” shatters the reverie, prompting the woman on-screen to extinguish her cigarette and retouch her red lipstick.

Here, Zita Hanrot plays an actor cast as the titular Suzanne Césaire—alongside Motell Gyn Foster as Martinican writer, politician, and founder of the Négritude movement Aimé Césaire, and Josué Gutierrez as French poet and principal theorist of surrealism André Breton—in a film production. But neither their project nor Hunt-Ehrlich’s appears to be a biographical work about the Martinican writer, theorist, feminist, teacher, mother, and anti-colonial activist who contributed to both aesthetic movements. We observe the artists reciting her essays, reading interviews with her family members, and studying photographs to gather traces of her subjectivity, where an averted gaze from the camera could hint at her relationship to being recorded. The performers in the roles of Suzanne and Aimé ask each other: How important is it that we understand this relationship? Does anyone get to be who they want to be completely, for themselves or the people they love? Is there a version of these two writers’ lives where they’re both remembered?

Their questions are unconcerned with narrative or continuity, an ordering of causes and effects, and are instead devoted to a practice of speculation. This is a function of necessity, perhaps, given that Suzanne Césaire’s entire body of writing—seven miraculous essays—can be located within the pages of Tropiques, a literary journal co-founded with her husband Aimé, published from 1941 to 1945. After this, the film explains, she would never write for a public audience again, though she continued to work, teaching school, participating in political organizing, and raising her six children. Between those articles, private correspondences with Breton, and interviews with her family members, what remains is a constellation of fragments that conceal as much as they reveal.

Far from crafting a traditional biopic, Hunt-Ehrlich presents us with shots of production trucks and filming notices, interspersed with staged reenactments, offering evidence of creation and mythmaking. Crew members linger around the set, a camera assistant marks the scene with a clapper board, a stand-in substitutes for Suzanne while a cinematographer measures the light. In its embrace of showing process, the film resists notions of objectivity and resolution, admitting that it may not hold all the answers, or even hope to. If I were to characterize this work, one that frustrates categories such as “docudrama” or “hybrid film,” which tend to reduce and flatten, I might describe it as an invitation to consider Suzanne Césaire’s ideas on one’s own terms, or as a séance to commune with the dead, reviving her presence in the world with each viewing.

Accepting the film’s generous invite, I eagerly read Césaire’s essays in The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945) (2009), compiled by Daniel Maximin and translated by Keith L. Walker. What I discovered was a vigorous thinker whose interests spanned the disciplines of anthropology, ecology, art, literature, history, psychology, and geography, leaping fearlessly among them without the impulse to confine her arguments within a particular field. I found her prose to be elegant, surprising, at times challenging, and I silently cursed myself for lacking the French skills to engage with Césaire’s words in their original form. Some compositions, like “Alain and Esthetics” and “André Breton, Poet,” resembled love letters, while others, like “1943: Surrealism and Us” and “The Great Camouflage,” were political treatises on Martinique’s culture and identity. Casting aside the conventions of essay writing, the author included excerpts of poetry, took lyrical diversions, and reflected in her language the principles of surrealism through courage and disruption.

Across Césaire’s work, I noted a preoccupation with landscape and the natural world, particularly as it relates to the ways in which land and climate shape their inhabitants. In “Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations,” she argues that one civilization “is tied to the plant, to the vegetative cycle,” whereas another “is tied to the animal, to the conquest of the right to live through violent struggle and conquest.” On the urgency of producing literary representations of Martinican culture, she remarks in “The Malaise of a Civilization”:

As for us, we can feel that our troubling times are going to precipitate the explosion of a ripened fruit, irresistibly called forth by solar fieriness to cast its creative forces to the wind; we can feel on this sun-drenched tranquil land, the formidable, the inescapable pressure of destiny which bathes the entire world in blood in order to give it tomorrow, its new visage.

Césaire’s attention to nature is echoed in the film by Hunt-Ehrlich, who never ceases to remind viewers of the natural environment, of the elements as active forces with both generative and destructive tendencies. A wind scatters pages of a manuscript across the location, the rumbling sky threatens to conjure a thunderstorm, clothing and hair adhere to perspiring skin. Shot in a botanical garden in South Florida, the film is backgrounded by lush verdure—palm fronds, tall grasses, cycads—that lends itself to mapping the tropical landscapes of Martinique as much as it disrupts the production and highlights the construction of the conservation space. Knowing that “nature camouflages reality,” Hunt-Ehrlich seeks to coax the deceptions and contradictions out of a setting.

Like Césaire, Hanrot’s character is a mother. Between takes, she cares for her infant on set, delivering instructions to her nanny and pushing a stroller in the shade. The presence of her child reminds us of the labor and time demanded of working mothers—always searching for pockets of rest, for opportunities to attend to one’s ambitions. It might be tempting to conclude that Césaire sacrificed her writing career to be a mother, that she would have preferred to carry on publishing, considering the disproportionate burden of childcare on women. Yet the film makes no such judgment; as Hanrot’s character plainly states, “It is difficult to be a productive writer when you have six children.” There’s no implication that publishing texts is inherently more valuable than caregiving; the film places the importance of production and reproduction on equal grounds.

Along these lines, I’m reminded of Eva Giolo’s The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (2022), a short film shaped by a collage of gestures in close-up: the cupping of hands to give clay its structure, the determined motion of winding a Bolex camera, an open palm rubbing circles against a pregnant belly. Through a game of association, Giolo explores various forms of creation across activities such as filmmaking, cooking, sculpting, and mothering. Each practice requires sustained repetition, a gestation period, choices that culminate in the development of a style. I wondered whether Césaire considered motherhood to be a creative act, opening the possibility that caregiving was compatible with her other commitments as an activist and educator, one method of making joyously traded for another.

Still, I’m aware of the impossibility of truly knowing Césaire, of the absurdity of smoothing out a life for the pleasures of a neat resolution. As I read her essays in preparation for this review, my experience mirrored that of the actress in Hunt-Ehrlich’s film; I was compelled to gather clues in every crevice and devise my own approach to remembering a life. I contemplated which questions were worth posing or solving, allowed Césaire’s work to move through me, and accepted that what made this kaleidoscopic portrait so captivating—and worthwhile—was its willingness to surrender completeness.

Césaire’s refusal of totality and containment—intentional or not—is honored by the filmmaker, who blurs fiction and nonfiction, shifting between past and present, but the sentiment is most clearly articulated in the film’s final moments. At the end, the characters playing Suzanne and Aimé stand on a lawn facing each other, their expressions tender and meditative. In an extension of their earlier conversation, Suzanne offers, “It’s not just that we’ve played these roles, or that love is so imperfect. It’s that death is certain, but not final.” As if broken out of a trance, he seeks clarification—“What?”—and is, in turn, answered with the same question before the film abruptly cuts to black. Their exchange ends in the middle, unfinished, with the trust that the viewer will pick up where the film left off, remembering, retracing, and remaking into the future.