The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review – the legacy of a dissident and inspirational surrealist author

Brief film looks at the intense flowering of essays by the Caribbean feminist and anti-imperialist who saw surrealism as a revolutionary mode This brief work from New York film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is the equivalent of a platform performance in the theatre: a look at the works of Caribbean feminist, anti-imperialist and surrealist partisan Suzanne Césaire, played by Zita Hanrot; Hanrot, rather, plays an actress musingly preparing to play her. Césaire’s brief, intense flowering of work occurred in second world war Martinique, then a colony of France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government. Paradoxically liberated by this oppressive situation, Césaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published an influential series of essays on politics, literature and art, which showed how passionately inspired she was by her encounter with the great surrealist André Breton. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/rx4iLoM via IFTTT

Eileen review – Anne Hathaway transfixes in off-kilter thriller

Sundance film festival: the Oscar winner gives a pitch-perfect turn in an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s hit novel that doesn’t push its weirdness far enough

There’s a fantastically well-measured performance from Anne Hathaway in the strange, if not quite strange enough, thriller Eileen, an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker prize-shortlisted novel. She’s an actor who doesn’t always find her sweet spot, admirably trying to show extensive range for a star of her high wattage, yet often not proving to be the right match for her material, big swings frustratingly filed away as big misses.

Hathaway has an outsized energy that can jar with roles that require a performer who can more convincingly, quietly disappear, and so in Eileen, where her character Rebecca is exploding into the drab world of 1960s Massachusetts as a glamorous, and potentially dangerous, bombshell, it’s a match-up that feels like kismet. Her arrival is a ground-shifter for bored 24-year-old Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) whose life consists of caring for her cruel alcoholic father (a horribly believable Shea Wigham, a sterling character actor long overdue for more attention), controlling her sexual desire and working a thankless job as a secretary at a juvenile facility. When Rebecca joins the staff as a psychologist, Eileen, like the men surrounding her, is unable to stop staring, a sudden flash of colour in an otherwise muted world.

Eileen premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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