When I first came to town they called me the roving jewel, now they've changed their tune and call me Katie Cruel.

Suzanne
Katell Quillévéré 2013 France
Starring: Sara Forestier, Adèle Haenel, François Damiens, Lola Dueñas, Paul Hamy, Corinne Masiero

Katell Quillévéré's Suzanne is a polarizing film portraying the first 25 years or so of its main character's life beginning with a horrendously oversexualized infant school performance in the late 80's through her fall into teenage motherhood in the 90's, where she drags her child to nightclubs teddy-in-hand and to racetracks via a speeding car driven by her underage sister Maria to the strains of Hole's Playing Your Song, to her modern day attempt at redemption with her first real passionate love, small-time crook Julien. But this isn't a tale of Riot Grrrl-style female empowerment, in fact Suzanne is about as far away from that as you can get, abandoning her life and family to run off into uncertainty with Julien as if only he matters to her. The biggest problem however is that, despite the expansive narrative, the film is a shockingly minimalist work, often jumping years and explanatory plot points in seconds leaving us to fill in the gaps as best as we can. We don't even see any meeting between Suzanne and the father of her child let alone have him identified nor is the subject ever broached again, it just sort of happens. The same goes for the crimes in the second half and her mother's death, which is never explained. Once again we only see the consequences. Maybe that's the point but it still feels like we're missing out. You also have to ask why Quillévéré has picked the moments we see from all the years covered. Many of the later scenes are needed for the story but some of the early seem entirely without any narrative point. In truth they don't relate to anything solid that happens later and could have easily been jettisoned in favour of the aforementioned missing pieces of the puzzle. There's also the question of why the emphasis is on Suzanne and why even when she disappears she's still the focal point. Sure, her name matches Leonard Cohen's song (sung over the credits by Nina Simone and just one part of an excellent soundtrack) as well as that of the central character in Maurice Pialat's much-loved piece on another rebellious young woman, À nos amours, but the focus could just as easily be on younger but paradoxically more mature sister Maria (a decent if mostly subdued Adèle Haenel) who is at least as interesting and, for the first hour, in at least as many scenes as her screen sibling. The pair's powder keg of a father is another possibility - his disintegration and descent into bitter old age is certainly the film's best, and only truly great, performance with Sara Forestier (Suzanne) in particular only leaping out of second gear in a brief fistfight with her boyfriend. For a moment it's almost as if he will take precedence but although the camera never leaves him in an extraordinary courtroom scene Suzanne is still the hub of the events. As such the film is a strange mix, undoubtedly containing some superb points with an intoxicating darkness beneath them (an early family picnic in the graveyard stands out) but others are just plain poor and end up feeling like little more than a series of anemically-connected episodes on a similar theme. There's also the fact that, considering that it's set over such a long period, the film is relatively short (barely an hour and a half) and you sort of feel like there should be more. More events, more exploration of character, more time spent on happenings, more of everything truthfully.