Roger Ebert once famously likened the movies to "a machine that generates empathy." It's a formulation I've never fully been able to swallow, for reasons that have less to do with Ebert's specific insight than with its reductive, ad-nauseam recycling by other critics and moviegoers.
Meaningful empathy, often assumed to be cinema's natural domain, can't be operated like an ignition switch; it isn't effortless, and it isn't automatically generative. It has no use for pandering and no patience with an audience's laziness. It requires time, focus and a subtle, molecular-level realignment of perspectives. The average movie insists on making its characters feel seen without first doing the basic work of looking and listening, or demanding that the viewer do the same.
The extraordinary new French drama "Saint Omer" is not an average movie in any sense. For long, spellbinding stretches, it compels you to look upon the face and figure of Laurence Coly, a young woman on trial in the murder of her infant daughter. Standing for most of the proceedings and speaking with dispassionate calm, she holds you with every word of her lucid, controlled and horrifying testimony, and also with her faintly regal bearing, the mix of resignation and defiance at play in her gaze. Even so, you can't help but notice that she often seems on the verge of vanishing — an effect heightened by her uncanny stillness and her brown-colored shirt, all but blurring into the courtroom's wood-paneled walls.
