Saint Omer: A Writer Witnesses a Mother Unhinged and a Society on Trial
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Recently selected by the Toronto Film Critics’ Association as the best international feature of the year, a Grand Prix winner at the Venice film festival and France’s Oscar nominee, the film Saint Omer is something original.
It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race.
The film, directed by Alice Diop, who has made documentaries until now, is based on a real-life case. In November, 2013, a 36-year-old Senegalese-born woman, Fabienne Kabou, travelled by train from Paris to Berck-sur-Mer in northwest France.
Rama (Kayjie Kagame) becomes increasingly affected by a child murder trial she attends in Saint Omer.
She booked a hotel, went out at night and left her 15-month-old daughter to drown on a beach. The arrest and subsequent earned headlines in France and England, where journalists commented on Kabou’s calm demeanour, advanced education and bizarre claims that she was a victim of sorcery. Following her trial in early 2016, she was sentenced, on appeal, to 15 years in prison.
In 2016, Alice Diop, travelled to the town of Saint Omer, near the crime scene, to witness Kabou’s week-long trial, an experience she has said in interviews she found deeply affecting. The filmmaker is also the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, and around the same age as Kabou. Along with co-writers Amrita David and novelist Marie N'Diaye, Diop drew extensively on court transcripts to dramatize the story.
The filmmaker’s surrogate in the film is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and professor, who attends the trial with the idea of using it for a modern update on the story of the Greek myth of Medea, a princess who slew her children in revenge for her husband’s unfaithfulness.
Rama is played by tall, regal Kagame, an actor of brooding reserve, which only heightens her brief flashes of intense emotion.
In an early scene, we see Rama in a lecture, discussing Marguerite Duras-scripted film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, while showing documentary clips of accused post-War French women accused of being Nazi collaborators, and paraded through the streets with their heads shaved.
Rama’s lecture serves as a sort of overture for the film to come: “The woman, an object of shame, becomes, thanks to the author, not only a heroine, but a human being in a state of grace.”
While the accused in Saint-Omer doesn’t exactly achieve the status of a heroine, the film similarly attempts to recognize the broken human living within the despised outcast. Rather than court-room fireworks, Diop’s approach is to slowly probe of the broader ramifications of the crime,
Most of the action consists of staring, and being stared back at, in sometimes uncomfortably long takes. From the start, the optics of the trial aren’t good: The accused is a disgraced Black woman immigrant led into the courtroom in handcuffs where she is forced to remain standing, while interrogated by white, robed court officials, and judged by a white jury.
Despite Rama’s relatively privileged position, it’s inevitable she identifies with the accused. Both are Black women pursuing academic careers. Both are them are in relations with white men, with bi-racial babies.
And both keep secrets from their families: When Rama visits her family with her partner, a cuddly white hipster musician, Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery), the interactions with her sisters and mother are tense. Rama and Adrien are expecting a baby, information Rama prefers to keep from her family.
Shortly after, Rama takes a train to Saint-Omer and checks into a small hotel to attend the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). She sits in the court by day, transcribing recordings from her smart phone in the evening.
Over the week-long trial, Coly is interrogated by the judge (Valérie Dréville) who, matter-of-factly points out the many inconsistencies in Coly’s testimony. She’s upbraided as a con artist by the prosecuting counsel (Robert Cantarella), while the defence lawyer, Ms. Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit) offers the mitigating context of how Coly, a Black immigrant woman with no friends or resources, was dismissed, isolated and ignored as her mental health declined.
Among the witnesses is the father of her child, a married white man in his sixties, who offers his self-serving version of the relationship, which he kept secret from his friends and family: “I would go as far as to say that we were happy” though “her silence could be very aggressive.”
Throughout, Coly’s demenour is transfixing, calm and deliberate. She speaks as if she were a curious observer of her own behaviour (“If I’m lying, I can’t know why.”). She’s a philosophy student who insists she is “Cartesian” in her logic, but has experienced auditory hallucinations and visions, and insists she must have been driven to her crime by sorcery.
Only once, does her impassive manner break, when she sits down suddenly, as if struck by a blow, during one piece of testimony. That happens when one of her college professors dismisses Coly’s ambition to write a doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein, accusing her, as an African, of “hiding behind a philosophy that is not about her.”
As she witnesses the racist condescension of the court and witnesses, Rama is deeply rattled on a personal level, and never more than a moment when Laurence meets her gaze and offers a half-smile. The experience causes Rama to have brief flashbacks, shards of memory of herself as a gangly adolescent, and of her own neglectful, angry mother.
A scene where her mother sets a box of powdered chocolate for the girl’s breakfast and leaves the room; in another a teen-aged Rama comes home from school, a menstrual blood stain on her white jeans. Her mother orders her out of the room.
Outside of the courtroom, protesters against child cruelty wave banners and chant, as if they were at a celebration. After the first day, Rama is joined for lunch by the other Black woman attending the trial, Laurence’s well-dressed mother, Odile (Salimata Kamate). When Rama says the trial must be tough on her, Odile seems primarily concerned about her daughter making a good impression with her politeness and good vocabulary.
In the end, the film defies expectations by not telling us the verdict. Instead, over last ten minutes or so of the film, Diop steers the film toward an emotional catharsis, with a somewhat heavy foot on the pedal.
The wrap-up begins with a clip of Rama, at night, watching a clip on her laptop of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea, starring Maria Callas, suggesting a mythic grandeur to the child’s murder.
The scene is followed abruptly by the defence’s summation, Ms. Vaudenay’s face filling the screen in her direct-to-camera soliloquy, as she describes the crime as “a tragic descent into hell, into which a mother led her child.”
Near the end, she wraps her arms around the defendant and the camera shows the faces of women in the courtroom, either stricken or weeping.
At its richest moments, Saint-Omer maintains a powerful ambiguity about Lawrence’s guilt and interior life. In the end, one senses, the director could no longer resist the need to step out of the shadows, to tell you what to think and feel.
Saint-Omer. Director: Alice Diop. Written by Alice Diop, Amrita David, Marie N’Diaye. Starring: Kayjie Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Robert Cantarella, Salimata Kamate and Thomas de Pourquery. Saint-Omer opens on Friday, January 20 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto), Bytowne Cinema (Ottawa), and Winnipeg Cinemateque, with other theatres to follow..