Summary
A sun-dappled Staten Island parlour, circa 1913, becomes the crucible for Suzanne Vernon’s porcelain existence: the last rose in a house choking on its own Victorian lace. Orphaned by a boating mishap that the neighbours still whisper about on wraparound verandas, the twelve-year-old is shuttled from one well-mannered guardian to the next like an heirloom whose provenance embarrasses everyone. First she lands with Aunt Lillian, who inventories Suzanne’s freckles as if counting cracks in Meissen; then with the affable but feckless Uncle George, whose cigar smoke curls into Suzanne’s dreams and turns them the colour of burnt marmalade. Finally she is parked at the Philipp mansion, a mausoleum of chandeliers and hushed rugs, under the legal stewardship of the icy Frau Cordelia Philipp—Adolf Philipp in a whalebone corset and a scowl sharp enough to slice pâté. Cordelia’s own son, Karl (Joseph Marquis), a lanky medical student with ink-stained fingers and a mouth that always seems on the verge of apologising, becomes the only hinge that squeaks open Suzanne’s solitude. Between piano scales that echo like distant carriage wheels and Sunday sermons delivered to parlour palms, the pair fashion a clandestine cosmos of muddy creek banks, penny arcades, and attic theatres where hand-me-down costumes become Trojan horses for first kisses. But the adults conspire: Cordelia has promised Karl to the whey-faced heiress Hortense De Forest, whose dowry can underwrite the clinic Karl secretly abhors. Suzanne, declared ‘an expensive whim of fate,’ is to be posted to a Montreal finishing school that sounds suspiciously like a lace-trimmed penitentiary. On the eve of the separation, Suzanne steals Cordelia’s opal brooch—the film’s cold heart—and barters it for a third-class rail ticket west, believing geography itself can outrun grief. Karl, discovering the theft, races through midnight docks where fog swallows gaslight, only to watch her locomotive hiss into darkness like a sigh he cannot finish. The final reel fractures into winter: letters unsent, snow on a Brooklyn tenement sill, Suzanne’s mitten prints on a frosted window as she whispers ‘I’m still here’—a ghost haunting her own childhood while Karl, now a junior surgeon in a ward of broken soldiers, pockets a stethoscope and a lock of strawberry hair, convinced that growing up means learning to live inside an unfinished sentence.
Review Excerpt
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The projector hiccups, the house lights die, and suddenly 1914 exhales across the screen like a daguerreotype sighing itself to life. My Girl Suzanne is not a film you watch; it is a parlour you stumble into, all hush and hair-oil, where every doily seems to pulse with secrets. Adolf Philipp—who also wrote, directed, and plays the sneering butler—understood that childhood can be a genteel massacre, and he stages it in drawing rooms so over-upholstered they feel like coffins lined in chintz.
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