“Saint Omer,” one of 2022′s near-perfect films, marks the narrative feature debut of the French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop. Set mostly in the northeastern French town of the title, it concerns a Paris professor following a murder trial there as primary research for her next book. That book, whose working title (which her publisher doesn’t like) is “Medea Castaway,” ties into the legacy of the Euripidean Medea myth and a forbidding question for the ages: How does a dramatist effectively 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 in “Saint Omer,” explaining what she has experienced in prison since her arrest. She speaks with calm, unsettling certainty; she’s at once resigned and resolved to speak the truth. Then 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 increasingly 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 Guslaigie Malanda walks along the sand with her 15-month-old daughter wrapped in a blanket. The woman dreaming this, the academic and novelist played by 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 empathetic defense attorney (Aurelia Petit) and badgered by the prosecutor (Robert Cantarella). An aspiring Ph.D. student in philosophy, Laurence believes she was cursed by her family for becoming, in her words, “an Oreo,” learning to speak and act like a white Parisian woman with colonialist airs.
Twice her age, a weak and 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 (tolerated?) by white colonialist traditional France for being so “well-spoken” and “intelligent.” There are other links between the women as well.
In so many instances, films about someone forever changed by someone else’s tragedy have a way of selling the someone-else short in dramatic terms. Not here. “Saint Omer” balances screen time, and our appreciation of Laurence and Rama, with unerring shrewdness. By the end, with Nina Simone’s version of the Rodgers & Hart standard “Little Girl Blue” accompanying images of the empty streets of Saint Omer, 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 very closely to the point of obsession. “Saint Omer” proceeds with a steady rhythm that never feels studied; the courtroom sequences play out in widely varying stretches of screen time, the first and longest running 40-plus minutes, not a minute wasted. Diop’s work as a documentarian, best known for the panoramic French societal portrait “Nous,” serves her well here. And this is a film without a speck of faux-documentary fakery, deployed all too often to impart a lazy sense of urgency and realism. “Saint Omer” relishes the opportunity to observe someone in close-up, listening, processing, remembering.
The judge in the fictionalized movie’s court of law, played with remarkable concentration and command by Valerie Dreville, gradually joins the crucial faces and voices in the drama unfolding. So much in the courtroom, and in Rama’s time away from it, back in Paris or lunching with the accused’s mother, 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 singularly moving courtroom drama. It bodes extremely well for this filmmaker’s next feature.
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'SAINT OMER'
4 stars (out of 4)
(In French with English subtitles)
Rated: PG-13 (brief strong language and some thematic elements)
Running time: 2:02
How to watch: Now in theaters
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