One of 2024’s best films, Seneviratne’s debut feature explores the hopes, anxieties, and frustrations of contemporary relationships

While there’s some truth to it, there’s also something sneakily funny about the proverb “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” In the way it’s normally intended, this expression means that you must be patient to win over your could-be lover. If you give them just enough time and distance to miss you, they’ll realize the depth of their true feelings and come back to you. Reunited, your relationship will be stronger — you’re both on the same page now. Before, you were only delirious with love. 

But isn’t this actually saying something much more ambiguous? We imagine it means that the other person will reciprocate our feelings, but wouldn’t our own heart be just as affected by the absence? And if that’s the case, how is our partner supposed to catch up to us? On the contrary, it seems that we would be operating at a constant deficit, our levels of affection never quite matching. In that way, nothing would change at all. But the funny thing is that it would feel different, at least for a brief moment, when we’re reunited and it feels like we’ve gotten what we want. But what if we were wrong to want that in the first place? Instead of reading the proverb as a source of hope, isn’t it just as compelling to see it as a warning: don’t fall too deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return your affections? This certainly sounds reasonable; however, it’s not romantic at all to live by this warning, which is why we lean on the typical meaning of “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

The unspoken, implicit meaning of this adage seems to animate Shaun Seneviratne’s bittersweet romantic comedy Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts (2024). This is Seneviratne’s first feature film, and it bears the mark of a perspicacious filmmaker attentive to the hopes, anxieties, and frustrations of relationships among millennials. The film observes what amounts to the waning days of a relationship as Ben Santhanaraj (Sathya Sridharan) visits his long-term partner Suzanne Hopper (Anastasia Olowin) in Sri Lanka, where she works for a shady NGO called Economic Integrity that grants microloans to female-led businesses. The trip is intended as a vacation to allow the long-distance couple a chance to reconnect after several months apart. But the demands of Suzanne’s job make any quality time together impossible. Suzanne’s boss has tasked her with recouping the delinquent loan payments, and while Ben is initially understanding of the situation, his patience wears thin as Suzanne appears to prioritize her job over their relationship. This leads to one argument or mishap after another. 

At first glance, Ben and Suzanne seems to be sympathetic toward Ben. He is ecstatic from the moment he arrives in Sri Lanka. He expects to see his partner waiting for him at the airport, and in a very wry moment he believes he has found Suzanne waiting in a car for him, only to discover that it is her boss. Suzanne is busy with work, but she’ll meet him the following day. When they talk over the phone later that night, Suzanne is apologetic but seems distracted. We never see Suzanne during this call, but we do see Ben. He looks tired from traveling and desperate to see Suzanne. Ben talks about how eager he is to see her, but Suzanne seems to return none of this longing. She ends the call abruptly, to such a degree that one’s impression of Suzanne before seeing her is that she does not feel for Ben what she once did. When they meet the next day, it seems to barely register with Suzanne that they have been apart from each other at all. 

In a telling scene shortly after their reunion Ben and Suzanne are alone together in a room. Suzanne has been wearing a face mask while traveling, but it has slipped her mind to take it off. Ben has to prompt her by asking, with some frustration, if she simply wears it all the time. Clearly, Ben takes this as a slight, an indication that Suzanne is not overcome with passion and desire for him in the same way that he is for her. Any viewer would be inclined to view this forgetfulness in the same light — even though we know almost nothing about their relationship at this point, we would expect that any person longing for their partner would want to tear their mask off at the first possible moment.

What is really telling about this scene is not Suzanne’s demeanor, but Ben’s. Clearly he has had a mental image of what their reunion would be like — of them sharing a moment of passion, of realizing the depths of their longing for each other, how much they need one another, etc. When he reminds Suzanne about the mask, he doesn’t seem especially mad, but annoyed, as if he expected her to be distant in some way. Suzanne is still the person she was when she left their life together — and for that matter, so is Ben. Likewise, one could easily imagine why Suzanne would neglect to remove her mask. It’s not out of health concerns or because Ben is undesirable, but why would she even bother? Ben is always expecting something. He has a fantasy in his head of their relationship, and it is understandable if Suzanne would feel weary in her position. It’s hard to make someone happy when they always want more, expect more, or only seem to notice the ways that you fall short.

Crucially, Seneviratne never provides us with a look back at Ben and Suzanne’s relationship within the film.¹ We are never given an obvious indication of what their life together in New York was like, or if there was a moment when Suzanne began to pull away from Ben. By the same token, Seneviratne does not contextualize Ben’s demeanor; we have only to think that it is a result of Suzanne’s own physical and emotional withdrawal from the relationship. Any such flashback to an earlier, more harmonious moment in their relationship, or explanation of where things began to sour, would turn Ben and Suzanne into a maudlin spectacle itself. Seneviratne understands that the reunion between lovers is predicated on a mutual feeling of connection, a memory of their time together, and a fantasy for what the rest of their time will look like. When long-term partners reconnect, what is being “reunited” is the temporality of the relationship — that is, its past, present, and future. This is why it is so important that Seneviratne structures his film in the four different chapters of Ben and Suzanne’s reunion. There is no singular moment when everything comes together with a rush of emotions as Ben and Suzanne realize, simultaneously, how much love they have for each other in the past, present, and future. On the contrary, the reunion is broken up, scattered across several days, individual moments constantly shifting between the highs and lows of their relationship. Put differently, because the reunion was not successful in its first instance, it must be repeated. Ben and Suzanne must reconstruct it, they must find the pieces of their relationship that have been lost to time and put things back together. But even though this is precisely what the couple attempt to do, Seneviratne leaves it an open question if this is something that either of them really want to do. 

Ben and Suzanne has a recurring bit that centers on Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997). Early in the film, Ben jokingly asks Suzanne if the bugs in Sri Lanka are anything like the insects of Verhoeven’s film. Ben is taken aback when Suzanne does not catch the reference, and he insists that she has seen the film before, and that they in fact watched it together. Suzanne claims to have zero recollection of this. Astounded, Ben makes it their mission to watch the film together on this vacation, and as fate would have it they stumble into a copy. They later attempt to watch the cult classic on the DVD player that Suzanne gave Ben for Christmas, but the DVD is, of course, region-locked. Much later in the film, after Ben and Suzanne have been through a painful argument that drives them apart, Suzanne happens on Starship Troopers playing on cable in their hotel. She proceeds to watch the film on her own and is instantly endeared by it. Shortly after, Suzanne learns that Ben has been rushed to the hospital, and when she finds him there they both exclaim their love for the film. It is one of the few moments in Ben and Suzanne that the two seem to be actually on the same page, and where they seem to actually be enjoying one another’s company.

For a while, this bit around Starship Troopers feels forced. Aside from a throwaway line about bugs, there are no resonances that connect Ben and Suzanne and Starship Troopers. Thematically and stylistically, they are wholly separate films. And yet, it is precisely because they are different that the forced connection is so crucial to Ben and Suzanne, specifically because of what it says about Ben and the nature of his relationship with Suzanne. In the way that he is both written and played, Ben is the stereotypical film bro, both genuinely enthusiastic and performatively so. Back in New York, he and Suzanne have a cat named after Ernst Lubitsch, but since Suzanne’s departure Ben has taken to calling their cat “Lubitsch” instead of “Ernst.” Obviously, the allusion to one of the great directors of subversive romantic comedies is more apt for Ben and Suzanne than Starship Troopers is, and yet the Lubitsch reference also feels forced. To be clear, I do not mean that Seneviratne is forcing these references into Ben and Suzanne, but rather that Ben is forcing them. These are aspects of his identity that he clings to, but it is strange that he does so with Suzanne. She does not seem to have the same affection for film or art as Ben does, which would lead one to imagine that the two surely share other interests that connect them. But over the course of Ben and Suzanne, we really do not see any evidence of this: Ben lives in his world of artists and experiences that nourish the soul, whereas Suzanne is more practical, concerned with the day-to-day of her job and can scarcely look away from her phone or laptop. Indeed, the two often seem annoyed by the other’s disposition — one, too much of an idealist and a jokester to take seriously, and the other, too distracted and distant to have a conversation with in the first place. But when they discuss Starship Troopers these dispositions fall away and they finally glimpse each other from a different angle.

One might be left to wonder, if Ben and Suzanne really are such opposite characters, how could they remain in this relationship for so long? Certainly, Seneviratne leaves the impression that the kinds of arguments and disconnects the lovers have in Sri Lanka are not new, even if they might have intensified over time and distance. Their relationship does seem to be one that both Ben and Suzanne have simply settled into, the way people go from dating in college to living together in their twenties as the currents of life simply push them together. It does not seem to be a relationship that either Ben or Suzanne are actively working on, even if they are going through the motions of it. And maybe, for a while, for both of them, that is just enough.

There is one moment in the film that is particularly indicative of Ben and Suzanne’s inertia. Ben is asked why he and Suzanne are not married, and he responds that they aren’t comfortable with it because there are so many people who cannot get married and that it’s a patriarchal, outdated institution that they don’t subscribe to. These are perfectly acceptable reasons to not get married, but they are not especially convincing coming from Ben. He seems to strain a bit as he gives the reasons, as if he and Suzanne have given them before but he’s still not opposed to the idea of marriage himself. One is left to believe that these are more Suzanne’s feelings than Ben’s, but it is crucial not to misunderstand the dynamic here. If this is true, it is not that Suzanne is keeping Ben from something he wants. Rather, it is that neither of them commit themselves to having a conversation that would require some kind of action — if this is something that either of them felt strongly about, they should have ended the relationship. Or did neither of them really feel that strongly about it? Maybe they have just coasted as far as they could without ever really talking about it.

It is this sense of inertia that Seneviratne understands so well. When nothing seems to change in their relationship, Suzanne pulls away; Ben will always be there anyway. On the flip side, Ben seems to believe that Suzanne will become a different person while she is away, that she will be more open, more romantic, more tender — more like him. And when nothing seems to change in a relationship, it is entirely possible that our perceptions of the relationship take over. We fantasize about how our lives would be different outside the relationship, what kind of people we would be in another life, or some miraculous event that will bring us closer together. In the absence of any meaningful progress, we create the sense of movement for ourselves.

Upcoming Screenings of Ben and Suzanne:

– New Jersey Film Festival (New Brunswick, NJ) – Opening Night – Sept 6 (Tickets)
– Adult Film’s Film + Theatre Festival (Brooklyn, NY) – Opening Night – Sept 13 (Tickets)
– Hi-Way Drive-In Theater (Coxsackie, NY) – Double Feature with Starship Troopers – Sept 22 (Tickets)

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1. Seneviratne previously made some (excellent) short films about Ben and Suzanne in the beginning stages of their long-term relationship. But like his feature film, they do not provide much exposition of what Ben and Suzanne’s “normal” life was like before her move.