“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.
