Real-life murder trial becomes singularly moving legal drama
One of 2022’s nearperfect films is now in limited theatrical release in the U.S. “Saint Omer” marks the narrative feature debut of French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop. Set in the northeastern French town of the title, it concerns a Paris professor following a murder trial there as research for her next book. That book, whose working title is “Medea Castaway,” ties into the legacy of the Euripidean Medea myth and a forbidding question for the ages: How does a dramatist humanize the act of infanticide?
“A woman who has killed her baby can’t really expect any sympathy,” says the accused murderer, a Senegalese emigrant living in France, explaining what she has experienced in prison since her arrest. She speaks with calm, unsettling certainty, at once resigned and resolved to speak the truth. She adds: “I shared their horror.”
Diop’s film, which won awards at the Venice film festival, is set up Janus-style as a mirrored consideration of two main characters, the accused and an invested observer. Working with screenwriter Amrita David, co-writer and director
Diop, born of Senegalese parents, begins with a visual premonition. At night, on the beach, the accused murderer played by Guslagie Malanda walks with her 15-month-old daughter wrapped in a blanket. The woman dreaming this, the academic and novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame), is envisioning what she’s about to learn: the story of how that mother got to this point in her life, and why.
On trial in the courtroom, Malanda’s fiercely contained character, Laurence, reveals details of the horror, coaxed by her defense attorney (Aurelia Petit) and badgered by the prosecutor (Robert Cantarella). Laurence believes she was cursed by her family for becoming, in her words, “an Oreo,” learning to act like a white Parisian woman with colonialist airs.
A weak, self-serving man still married to someone else, Laurence’s lover (Xavier Maly) apparently kept Laurence, and then their unwanted child, squirreled away from the rest of his life. This “isolated, invisible woman,” as the counselor calls her, turned inward, started hallucinating and finally killed her child at high tide.
Novelist Rama watches this trial unfold in her own related state of suspended animation. She, too, has a fraught relationship with a Senegalese mother. She too knows the ever-present othering of being a Black woman praised by white colonialist France for being so “well-spoken” and “intelligent.”
“Saint Omer” balances screen time, and our appreciation of Laurence and Rama, with unerring shrewdness. By the end, Diop has turned a straightforward premise into the stuff of unassuming, unexpected and authentic poetry.
The movie is inspired by a real case, one which Diop herself followed closely. “Saint Omer” proceeds with a steady rhythm that never feels studied. So much in the courtroom, and in Rama’s time away from it, circles the matter of mothers and daughters, “outsiders” and insiders, immigrants in modern-day France facing bone-deep cultural dislocation. Those issues are part of everything in the narrative, but above all “Saint Omer” is a moving courtroom drama. It bodes well for this filmmaker’s next feature.
MPA rating: PG-13 (brief strong language and some thematic elements) Running time: 2:02
How to watch: In select theaters