There is a scene near the beginning of Saint Omer that suggests why director Alice Diop chose to render this tale, based on a real incident and a real trial, as a fiction film rather than as a documentary, which is what she’s known for. After the spectators are seated and photographers have taken pictures of the courtroom, the head judge asks all journalists to leave. If Diop were to make a documentary about the story, she would not have any footage related to the trial, and it’s the trial that interests her. Diop’s stand-in is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and university lecturer who, in the opening scene, discusses in class Marguerite Duras in reference to a film of French women having their heads shaved after the war for “collaborating” (read: sleeping) with occupying German soldiers. This specific act “humiliates women” by “sublimating violence” toward them. The scene resonates throughout the movie, which focuses on a young Senegalese woman who killed her 18-month old baby. Rama is also of Senegalese background, and while she grew up in France and the defendant, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), came to France as a student, they both have troubled relationships with their respective mothers that Diop believes warrants scrutiny. Ostensibly, Rama is attending the trial to write a book comparing Coly’s story to the Greek myth of Medea, but in a phone conversation with her publisher late in the film, she implies, at least to the viewer, that she’s not sure if that’s the best thing to do. Now that she’s there watching the trial, Coly’s story means something else to her.

And that something else remains hidden for the length of the movie, which rarely steps out of the Saint Omer courtroom. The trial is presented in as dry a manner as possible and appears to be an open-and-shut case, since Coly admits to the murder. The only question left to answer is: Why? She professes to have loved the child and believes that she succumbed to “sorcery,” though, as she points out early in the proceedings, “I’m here to find out if that’s true.” The middle aged female judge seems sympathetic to Coly’s situation, and her questions are designed to allow the young woman plenty of latitude to explain how her mindset may have been affected by the stress of her studies, the trauma of growing up in a broken home, and the economic straits she found herself in after moving to Paris. For the most part, Coly dismisses these extenuating circumstances by downplaying them, allowing the male prosecutor to wedge in his claim that she killed her child out of pure selfishness, while her own attorney plays up a defense based on “madness.” Meanwhile, Rama sits in the gallery with a pained expression on her face. At one point she manages to have lunch with Coly’s mother, who shares her daughter’s belief that she has been cursed, but in any case thinks she should be punished for what she did.

As fascinating as the trial is, it doesn’t go anywhere, and Diop’s use of Rama as a kind of reflecting board muddies the movie’s intentions even more. Rama is pregnant and, as with Coly, the father of her child is white, though he is much younger than the man (Xavier Maly) Coly lived with for financial reasons, as she admits. Perhaps the most trenchant point of identification is that Coly came to France to be an academic and study philosophy, an element to her story that brings out the only expression of overt racism in the film, when her former professor testifies that, as an African, Coly could never possibly comprehend her choice of a thesis topic: Wittgenstein. Here, Coly’s humiliation for being a bad mother is compounded by her being a pretender to bourgeois intellectualism, and Diop makes sure we see Rama’s withering reaction. Though there’s little action in Saint Omer, there’s a lot going on, which makes it both riveting and frustrating. 

In French and Wolof. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Saint Omer home page in Japanese

photo (c) Srab Films-Arte France Cinema-2022