Mark Reviews Movies: SAINT OMER

Saint Omer, Super LTD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 12, 2023

Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop makes her narrative debut with Saint Omer, which primarily dramatizes a fictionalized version of a real-life court case. It's a bit more than that, though, because the case, the prosecution of a mother who killed her 15-month-old baby, is haunting in both its clarity and the elusiveness of some easy explanation.

Diop makes another simple but notable choice in how she presents this story. This isn't just a dramatization, seen from some objective, omniscient point of view. The perspective here belongs to Rama (Kayije Kagame), a university professor and author who leaves her home in Paris to the northern commune of Saint-Omer to observe and document the trial.

At first, this character seems like a stand-in for the audience or, perhaps, the filmmaker herself, whose own experiences watching a court proceeding similar to this one inspired the making of the film. As the case proceeds, though, Rama's personal but indirect connection to the case and the accused becomes clearer. By the end, the character's uncertainty about why this tragic crime occurred is her own, but in putting us Rama's way of thinking about the case, it becomes ours, too.

We don't learn too much about Rama. We also don't need to. The screenplay, written by the director with Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye, sees her teach a lecture on the writer Marguerite Duras, noting how she could make poetry of suffering—the public humiliation of women in the specific piece the professor covers. Notably, there's little such poetry in the testimonies of the trial that follows, so this sliver of any idea hangs there throughout the film to be challenged by the reality of what has happened.

In her personal life, Rama, the child of immigrants from Senegal, is in a steady romantic relationship with white musician Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery) and has a tenuous relationship with her mother (played by Adama Diallo Tamba). While Rama's siblings want her to help the mother attend physical therapy in the coming days, she has other obligations, and one gets the sense Rama would try to avoid the contact with her mother if she didn't have to travel north for the trial.

Rama, we learn, is writing a book about this particular case. It revolves around Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman who admits to leaving her baby on the beach in the middle of the night. The infant girl drowned, now, Laurence is standing trial for the baby's murder.

Much of what follows in this story is a re-creation of a court proceeding, with a head judge (played by Valérie Dréville) overseeing jury selection, Laurence's attorney (played by Aurélia Petit) and the prosecutor (played by Robert Canterella) dismissing or agreeing to jurors, and Laurence awaiting what's to come with a constant, stoic expression locked on her face. Malanda's performance, which demands several lengthy takes of monologues from fixed angles, is compelling in how calm and collected she remains, particularly because the subtle or overt cracks in Laurence's steady demeanor become all the more apparent.

We simply watch the proceedings. Sometimes, the camera takes Rama's perspective, as she stares at Laurence or notes the reaction of the defendant's mother Odile Diata (Salimata Kamate), to whom the author wants to speak at some point after the proceedings one day. At other times, Diop's camera takes the approach that this trial exists beyond Rama's viewpoint of it, as Laurence testifies about the events leading up to her pregnancy, giving birth alone in an art studio owned by her older and married lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), raising the child in solitude for more than a year, and finding her way to that beach.

Laurence speaks, as do Luc and the judge and the attorneys and a psychologist, and Diop trusts us to listen, to understand the circumstances, to find certain contradictions (The account of the baby's father in particular is filled with them, when he's not simply trying to rationalize his apparent absence from the life of his newborn child and her mother), and to attempt to understand an act that almost everyone here deems "incomprehensible." Even Laurence doesn't comprehend why she did what she did, and from the beginning of the hearing, the defendant announces that she hopes some answer will reveal itself to her. If the proposed title of her book is any indication, Rama sees this tragedy and crime as something ancient—as old at least as the myth of Medea, who killed her own children after being scorned by her husband.

Those are the larger concerns of this tale, but Diop ensures they remain contained to this narrative, too. After all, Rama is drawn to this case because of the similarities between herself and Laurence. Both come from Senegalese families (Laurence becomes convinced that some relatives put a curse on her, and there's an intentionally uncomfortable scene in which the character and the culture are verbally dissected like some otherworldly specimens). Laurence's mother was as harsh on her as Rama's was distant and unaffectionate (Some flashbacks show us the gap of silence that existed between them). Finally, Rama eventually reveals that she's pregnant. For Rama, then, the more pressing question than how and why to write a book about the case is how far the similarities between these two women could extend.

There are no answers here, despite the most obvious one appearing to be a given almost from the start. Saint Omer asks too many difficult and troubling questions for any straightforward resolution, and much to Diop's credit, she does ask them and doesn't attempt to provide any answers.

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