In the French courtroom drama Saint Omer, set in the small town of the same name, a young Senegalese woman stands trial for killing her 15-month-old daughter.
Guslagie Malanda plays Laurence, the film's tragic central figure, who is mostly confined to sitting in a small wooden dock, and is framed in various frontal mid shots. Her conservative sweater, which is almost the same hue as the court's tawny brown wood panelling, gives the impression she's being smothered by her surroundings.
Laurence speaks in a soft voice, with barely a hint of emotion, and has the cultivated vocabulary of someone who came to France to study philosophy.
But she seems as bewildered by her crime as the court. When asked why she killed her daughter, by leaving her on a beach at night to be swept away by the rising tide, she replies, "I hope this trial will give me the answer," then offers a bizarre hypothesis: She is the victim of a curse.
Senegalese French writer-director Alice Diop, who has a background in documentary, was inspired by a real-life trial she attended as a public observer in 2016.
The case caused a sensation across France, fanning anxieties about multiculturalism and whether migrants were capable of integrating into French life.
Here was a woman who spoke sophisticated French, who professed an admiration for Western culture and rational thought, blaming her crime on witchcraft.
It was a story that appealed to the prurient inclinations of tabloid and highbrow audiences alike, but in Diop's absorbing, finely constructed film, the strange, tragic details of the case inspire a thoughtful and complex examination.
In depicting the accused woman with marked restraint, both in terms of performance and camera work, she paints a baffling, practically inscrutable figure.
But she frames the story with her own experience as a courtroom observer, and in the process makes room for a multifaceted exploration of migrant alienation.
Across the courtroom from the accused, sitting in the public gallery, is Diop's alter-ego of sorts: Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant Senegalese French woman about the same age as Laurence.
Rama is a novelist from Paris, fascinated by how the case echoes the myth of Medea, the subject of her upcoming book.
But she's not prepared for the echoes between her own life and Laurence's, and how the trial will have a profound impact on her, both as a mother-to-be and as a daughter whose relationship with her own mother has long been dysfunctional.
The mirroring between the stories of the two women – both are intellectuals, both have white French partners, both are Senegalese French – helps the film expand beyond the narrow story of Laurence's crime.
But it is Diop's layering, and deliberate blurring, of different mother and daughter relationships that underlines the film's central focus: maternal love, estrangement and resentment.
This blurring is foreshadowed in the film's opening scene, where Rama has a nightmare about Laurence leaving her daughter to die on the beach.
When she wakes suddenly, her partner tells her she was calling out her own mother's name.
Soon after, we meet Rama's mother (Adama Diallo Tamba) – frail and weary – at a family lunch, and we get to witness the unspoken tension between the two. They barely exchange a word.
Elaborating on the origins of this iciness, though never providing a neat explanation, Diop inserts flashbacks from Rama's childhood throughout the film; vignettes where we see her as a quiet teenager, and her mother as a glamorous woman in her prime, entrapped in what seems like a difficult marriage.
A scene in the master bedroom depicts them both sitting on a bed before a family dinner at Christmas, staring glumly into a dressing table mirror. This melancholy moment contrasts with home video footage from the same evening, which shows the family at the table — the juxtaposition reminding us that personal memories often run counter to the images in photo albums and family archives.
Laurence also had a difficult childhood. In the courtroom, she describes extremely demanding parents who encouraged her to speak only French, which set her apart from her friends, in order to be able to study law in France. Their disappointment when she chose to study philosophy is what drove a wedge between them.
She describes a life spent trying to meet expectations – those of her ambitious parents initially, and later those of her white French partner, the father of her child.
The relationship with this man, who she describes as an artist, is one of the film's weirdest and most telling biographical revelations. Her description of their life together conjures an image of almost cloistered servitude, setting up the expectation of some kind of imposing figure.
But when we finally see him on the witness stand, he is a portrait of ordinariness: a man with a stooped posture, in an ill-fitting cheap suit, decades older than her.
To have ended up subservient to this grey figure illustrates the black hole into which Laurence's self-esteem has fallen.
For Rama, the cumulative impact of such revelations about Laurence's unhappy life takes a toll. Despite her almost pathological obsession with keeping a lid on her emotions, she becomes overwhelmed by anger, sorrow and fear, and Diop's direction in turn becomes more expressive, allowing the camera more freedom to move.
There is a sense that Rama believes that if certain moments in her life had panned out differently, she could have ended up a victim of the same isolation and despair that led Laurence to her fatal act.
What's clear is that she can't help but identify with the woman in the dock, and this comes from a place of empathy, which in turn reflects Diop's attitude. This empathy spreads to the other women in the courtroom by the end of the film, who are all touched by Laurence's testimony.
All the same, there's no redemption for Laurence, just as there's no erasing her culpability.
Diop responds to the abyss of her nihilistic act as best she can — by exploiting cinema's ability to convey emotions and inner life. She has made a fine film about love – its precious appearance in our lives and its devastating absence.
Saint Omer is showing now in cinemas.
