Kritiken

Quillévéré has deliberately created a difficult character, but the difficulties of the film are both psychological and technical. Suzanne's deeply pensive, occasionally obscure character makes her a tough one to root for, especially as her deportment oscillates at random between loaded glances and violent outbursts. Sara Forestier is a magnetic performer but we are never invited underneath the tent flaps of her character...

Quillévéré swiftly covers some 20 years in Suzanne's life, her ellipses built for speed rather than mystery... Recreating the '90s solely with flannel shirts and Hole cues is a neat trick, but Quillévéré never seems to figure out the point of everything she's filming.

The adventurousness of the film lies in its fragmentation, in the way that it lets Suzanne herself disappear from the action for long periods, so that the film's titular subject becomes less a character than a sort of elusive phantasm.

...Suzanne revivifies a French subgenre of scrappy delinquency with its elegantly attenuated chronology and ably earned lump-in-the-throat sentiment.

Like Poison, Suzanne can feel derivative of other recent French cinema. Hansen-Løve's storytelling breakthroughs cast a large shadow over the picture, as do the deceptive formlessness of Maurice Pialat (Loulou, A Nos Amours)... Yet Quillévéré doesn't seem as enslaved to her models this time around—she seems to be working through them and slowly establishing her own voice. The most distinctive aspect of Suzanne is the film's commitment to anticlimax.

Only 91 minutes long, every one of them rich with the quotidian details of provincial working-class life, the movie captures crucial stages in the lives of Suzanne and her adoring younger sister as they grow from irrepressible pre-schoolers into the adults that no one, including us, expected them to become.

The topic itself might not be the most innovative, but the film is beautifully put together by someone, who has a natural directorial instinct and talent for working with actors. And the actors here are splendid, especially Sara Forestier and Adèle Haenel, who create a complex and believable landscape for their characters' souls.