Suzanne

I had heard so many wonderful things about Suzanne and so I went into it with great expectations only to have them dashed.

Suzanne is less of a movie than a series of vignettes. I don't have a problem with unstructured or loosely structured movies, but with Suzanne the movie covers such a broad amount of time (over 20 years) and is so short (90 or so minutes) that it feels jolting to watch as children bloom into adults abruptly with no transitions between scenes.

Loosely, the film follows the Merevsky family which consists of a father and two daughters after their mother dies. The family is working class, and the father works as a truck driver with long absences, but they are close knit. Suzanne is the eldest and she falls pregnant with a son that she raises as a single mother with her family. Sometime later she falls in love with a low-level drug dealer and things go south for the two of them as they can't keep away from one another, nor can they find a more lucrative means of employment.

The acting is very good and director Quillévéré has a beautiful eye for making the movie feel cinematic despite the very basic subject matter, but again, the plot is so scattered and he vignettes go by so quickly it's hard to care.

A missed opportunity, especially with so much talent behind and in front of the camera.

Excellent tearjerker, presented in episodes of one life (Suzanne's, duh) in the course of many years, from childhood to motherhood, etc... What makes the film special is how wisely those episodes are chosen, exposing a great deal of information in a very effective way for each case, and this is sustained throughout the entire runtime, right until the end. It is effective as we learn both what is shown and what underlies it, with precise cinematic language, and the accumulated emotional charge is never excessive, there is no fanfare but a gentle, deep and steady melancholy. I was engaged and this 90s minutes telling of half a life passed me by like a teary breeze, every scene matters. Researching Adèle Haenel's filmography is a great idea, highly recommended, she doesn't do bad films.

The story: Suzanne (Sara Forestier) is a French working-class girl raised by a loving widowed father (François Damiens) along with her sister Maria (Adèle Haenel). A single mother at a very young age, she meets the wrong guy in town, a seductive petty criminal (Paul Hamy) she immediately falls for. She soon leaves her job to spend more time with her lover, starts to neglect her son... Suzanne's life is about to sink really hard.

The story behind the story: Suzanne is Katell Quillévéré's 2nd film after Love Like Poison (Un Poison violent) in 2010. Since then, she has directed an outstanding drama about heart transplant, Heal The Living (Réparer les vivants).

The pluses:

• A couple of great (and I mean really great) moments: when Suzanne's son calls her by her name rather than Mum (those who saw the film will understand what sequence I'm referring to), the way she hears of a bad news within her family...
• Solid acting from lead role Sara Forestier, and even better one from Adèle Haenel as Suzanne's faithful younger sister.

• Very original if not always compelling storytelling, letting the most spectacular events offscreen and showcasing more mundane but still very evocative moments of Suzanne's life.

The minuses:

• The downturn to the fragmented & elliptic storytelling I mentioned before: jumping from one vignette to another, I had the feeling of missing too much of the characters' lives & interactions to root for them as much as I should.

• While the film spans over 25 years or so, the depiction of the 80s or 90s is rather poor: the clothes, the cars, not to mention François Damiens' ludicrous fake hair when he's supposed to be young. This may sound like a detail, but I thought it undermines the veracity of it all.

• The story is rather interesting, but I'm still not really sure what point Katell Quillévéré wanted to make here (if there was ever a point to be made).

Verdict: Overall, I enjoyed watching this touching family saga, but I felt Katell Quillévéré's unquestionable talent may have been better served with a more focused story such as in Healing The Living.

Set in Marseilles and its environs, SUZANNE is a family saga taking place over a quarter of a century involving the eponymous central character (Sara Forestier), her sister Maria (Adèle Haenel), and single parent father (François Damiens). We first encounter Suzanne as a little girl preparing for a dance display; she thoroughly enjoys the experience of performing in front of an audience, but the smile on her face freezes as the jamboree comes to an end. There is something not entirely happy about her existence.

This is a telling moment, as it foreshadows the turbulent progress of Suzanne's development from childhood into womanhood. Her father is a truck-driver, which necessitates his being away from home for lengthy periods at a time. The two sisters do their best to look after themselves, but it seems unsurprising that the adolescent Suzanne should end up pregnant. She subsequently falls deeply in love with petty criminal Julien (Paul Hamy), an affair that puts her family loyalty to the test. Torn between love and duty, Suzanne eventually absconds and ends up in jail.

SUZANNE might be described as the antithesis of the growing-up movies of the mid-Sixties, which celebrated the new-found freedoms of the teenage generation. GEORGY GIRL (1966) might be considered an example. Katell Quillévéré's film includes at least one sequence where Suzanne and Julien display that freedom; but it is set within a framework that is decidedly prison-like. Even before Suzanne serves her sentence, she has to cope with life in a series of poky apartments and/or hotel rooms, all of them dingily furnished. Hence it's hardly surprising that she should desire some form of escape through love.

As the narrative unfolds, so Suzanne's plight becomes more and more desperate. Yet nonetheless we have to admire her for the way she resists all that life has to throw at her. In the end she achieves some kind of emotional fulfillment, even if her immediate surroundings seem less than prepossessing.

SUZANNE is very much a character-focused piece of work, with the camera being particularly adept at portraying the depth of Suzanne's relationship with Julien and her son Charlie (Timothé Vom Dorp) through tight close-ups and two-shots. The action ends with Suzanne's father driving away with the adolescent Charlie (Jaime Da Cunha) across a bare landscape at sunset to the strains of Nina Simone's "Suzanne" (1969). This is an apt choice of song, drawing attention to the character's virtues and her stoicism, despite everything that happens to her.

There's a lot to like in Katell Quillévéré's film 'Suzanne', the story of a woman who's life drifts out of control: its great sense of natural warmth and emotion, and the delicate, poignant soundtrack. Credit should go to the two young actresses at its heart. But the film lacks the intensity you might expect in a story of self-destructiveness: it's episodic nature spares us from the gloom of Suzanne's lowest moments in a way that doesn't feel wholly honest and undermines the context of the happier scenes. Another way of putting it is that the film lacks a fixed perspective: we see Suzanne's life neither quite as she sees it, nor as anyone else does. But Quillévéré is clearly a natural talent: she will make great films in future, even if this one isn't quite there.