Saint Omer - AFI Fest
What would lead a mother to commit infanticide? Fueled by that very question, Alice Diop creates a subtle legal drama looking at grief and isolation caused by motherhood while touching upon antiblackness in French society.
At the beginning of the film, the audience meets Rama, a Franco-Senegalese novelist. She is traveling to attend the trial of Laurence Coly, who killed her 15-month-old daughter in Saint-Omer. She is currently working on a modern-day adaptation of Medea and is using the trial as research. Diop compactly look into the life of Rama. She has a strained relationship with her mother, and their only form of communication is silence. Flashback sequences show glimpses of their limited interactions with one another. She has a fear of being her mother. Rama is also pregnant while on this assignment which causes her to have deliberations about motherhood. Multiple times throughout the case she reconsiders her position there and adds to the pain of black mothers and daughters.
Diop equips her talents as a documentarian to establish a naturalism to this courtroom drama. She uses the camera to observe the actors’ reactions as they hear the dialogue presented in the scenes. The film mostly takes place in the courtroom as the proceedings go on, keeping it claustrophobic with no room to breathe as the case unravels. For such a monstrous action, the room remains calm and cool the entire time.
From the moment Coly enters the wooded courtroom, the sunlight beams on her to exude innocence in contrast to the evidence piling up against her. She never breaks in front of the judges or court observers, she is aware she is being watched. Like the people occupying the courtroom, Laurence doesn’t know why she killed her baby. The only thing she can think of is sorcery, so she is using the proceedings to help her find the answer.
Through questions from the court, she remembers a life of privilege and pressure. Her parents wanted her to become the perfect Frenchwoman and be a symbol of elegance which ended up isolating her from others. She escaped to France to be free, but those pressures stayed with her. Moving to France was not the answer as she was cut off financially and had no home or job. This led her to move in with her older boyfriend, Luc Dumontet, and she fell pregnant with his child. She further isolated herself from society during this time.
Since this film is dense in its dialogue and contains a lot of glances, it requires a high cadence of performers. The cast Diop assembles delivers in their ability to become those characters and play off one another. Guslagie Malanga is giving a performance that actors could only achieve after decades of their careers. She communicates the complexity of Laurence through mostly facial expressions and body movements. In each scene until the very end, she maintains composure that hides her self-delusion.
The trial is an interesting look at what type of people society wants to understand. The prosecuting attorney grows aggressive in his questioning of Coly. It feels like he has already made his mind up on the case just based on the facts and the color of her skin. There is underlying racism in his statements directed toward her causing Rama to become nauseated with what the trial is deciding to focus on. Even Coly’s professor who takes the stand believes that an African woman can’t possibly write a thesis on an Austrian philosopher. These comments lead the audience to believe that the court is more interested in sentencing her than in understanding who they are prosecuting.
To describe Saint Omer in one word would be; subtle. Unlike other courtroom dramas, it doesn’t rely on a shock value or over-performed moment. The characters tell the audience what they need to know through intense glances that sets the tone. It asks for more from its audience than is this woman guilty? It breaks the mold of how people think of a procedural film through its philosophical presentation.