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

Jeanne du Barry review – Cannes kicks off with Johnny Depp’s purring and peculiar royal dandy

Louis XV’s infatuation with a sexy, smart courtesan played by Maïwenn – who also writes and directs – is an entertaining spectacle but preening Depp’s king overshadows her story

The rosebud lips of Johnny Depp in this film are pursed in a strange expression of irony, stupefied entitlement and droll, martyred awareness of the absurdity of which his royal person is the centre: a human candle starting to melt. He plays Louis XV in the decadent court of pre-revolutionary Versailles, purring his lines in French and playing him as the ageing, slow-moving dandy – though Rip Torn was sexier in the same role in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

Depp might actually have been better cast as the lead: Madame Jeanne du Barry, the low-born and entrancingly sensual mistress and royal favourite with whom the king was scandalously infatuated at court, permitting her all manner of familiarities and intimacies. Jeanne is in fact played by the movie’s director, Maïwenn, who has written the screenplay with Teddy Lussi-Modeste and Nicolas Livecchi.

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