Issues surrounding motherhood are so charged that it’s exceedingly rare to find a treatment that delves into the darker currents so nonjudgmentally: the fears of expectant mothers, informed by memories of their own imperfect maters, the notion that you’re forever linked at the cellular level to another being, with all the beauty and terror this implies. That’s a large part of Alice Diop’s extraordinary first fiction feature, though it also feels limiting to reduce such a complex, 360-degree film into one broad concept. Saint Omer takes a simple court procedural format – a Senegalese woman in France is on trial for drowning her infant – and ever so slowly builds it into an overwhelming rumination on motherhood and racial expectations, not via the usual showy courtroom drama, which is all talk, but through silences and gazes as well as words.
Diop’s documentary We challenged audiences to recognize the way people of color are unconsciously perceived in France (and by extension, Europe and the U.S.), where the urge to qualify descriptions, such as “articulate black woman” or “well-dressed black man” reveal a smothering blanket of racism that impacts daily lives. Saint Omer, based on the real trial of Fabienne Kabou, brilliantly channels this constant undercurrent throughout the clean, rigidly structured script, using the original case to interrogate perception, truth and the complex binds of motherhood. There’s simply no chance this film will come away empty handed at Venice, notwithstanding the notorious unreadability of festival juries.
When we first see Rama (Kayije Kagame), she’s waking out of a dream. Her partner Adrian (Thomas De Pourquery) says she was asking for her mother, to which she replies, “Don’t be ridiculous.” With just these few words, as well as dismissive body language, we’re granted insight into this woman’s complex relationship with her mother Seynabou (Adama Diallo Tamba), which will inform the entire film, including some nicely textured flashbacks. At her mother’s apartment with her siblings, Rama is stiff and uncomfortable, prickly when asked questions and shutting down Adrian’s attempt to let her family know she’s pregnant.
Rama is a professor and novelist, seen in the classroom showing silent footage of female collaborators having their heads shaved after the fall of the Vichy government; over these images, she reads from Marguerite Duras’ text for Hiroshima, mon amour, in which the woman recounts her experience of being shaved and branded a collaborator. Rama’s poetic analysis imparts a state of grace to Duras’ heroine largely thanks to language: her eloquent expression of forbidden love and its humiliating consequences renders the act of falling for a Nazi soldier something bordering on glorious, despite the problematic love itself. This and Rama’s earlier visceral responses to Seynabou, who remains throughout a shadowy, uninterrogated figure, give us the intellectual and emotional information we need regarding what’s to come.
As research for her new novel, provisionally called “Medea Castaway,” Rama goes to Saint Omer, near Calais, for the trail of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese woman who left her 15-month daughter Elise on the beach at high-tide so she’d drown. Claire Mathon’s unyieldingly observant camera takes in Laurence’s arrival in the court, her handcuffed hands attached to a short leash that conjures deeply uncomfortable images, especially given that the room is all white apart from Rama and Laurence’s mother Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate). Once jury selection is completed, the judge (Valérie Dréville) begins to query the defendant, who’s already confessed her guilt; in response to the question “do you know why you killed your child,” Laurence replies “no, I hope to find out in this trial.”
The judge’s questions are direct and, on the surface, unemotional, but Dréville is such an extraordinary actress that her eyes register the bewilderment that her voice cannot. At this point the camera is largely fixed on Laurence, at mid-distance, turned to face the bench, and she answers the questions about her life, from early days to now, with an articulate insightfulness, or rather, an eloquence that seems to convey insight. Her lawyer (Aurélia Petit) and the general counsel (Robert Cantarella) occasionally make direct points from opposite sides, and Laurence claims that the spate of misfortune and depression before she killed her child must be due to witchcraft. The main witnesses called are her untrustworthy, much older white lover at the time, Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), and Mrs. Diatta, whose relationship with her daughter is, in a word, complicated.
We hear a lot about Laurence’s life, or at least the parts she chooses to tell, which are occasionally proven to be inventions, and we also get the reactions of the legal professionals who don’t know what to make of her. From their white European viewpoint, Laurence is a contradiction on multiple levels: an African student of Wittgenstein who speaks impeccable French, raised by a far less educated mother whose language isn’t nearly as formal as her daughter’s. In the court’s eyes, it both makes sense that she’d believe in sorcery, since she’s from Senegal, and yet it also perplexes them because she’s studied Western philosophy, which seems to preclude such superstitions. On top of which is the ultimate conundrum: how can a mother kill her child?
Through it all, Rama watches, rapt, feeling a connection with Laurence as well as being disturbed to her core. Saint Omer doesn’t seek to answer that impossible question, “why?”: it haunts our mythologies and literature precisely because it’s not logically comprehendible. Neither does Diop and her fellow scriptwriters fully sift fact from fiction in Laurence’s story, knowing too well that she, like all people of color in Caucasian societies, is already saddled with the burden of having to explain herself. Blithe active and passive racism, the Orientalizing of the other, they’re all woven throughout the plot, which also asks that essential question: what does a mother pass on to her child, and how do you bear that responsibility?
Each performance is compelling and beautifully contained. Kagame’s Rama is so flinty, burdened with a complicated past we never fully discover while trying to negotiate the burden of differing expectations, her own not the least of them. Malanda is remarkable in maintaining a calm yet not cold directness as Laurence tries to find eloquent words to explain something outside of language’s capabilities. Both women hold the camera as much as the camera fixes them, which moves closer with each court session until Laurence is almost looking straight out, ensuring that we too are riveted. The film ends with Nina Simone’s rendition of “Little Girl Blue,” heard over shots of Saint Omer and vicinity, and then, just like at the very beginning, we hear breathing. The breathing of a mother.
Director: Alice Diop
Screenplay: Alice Diop, Amrita David, Marie Ndiaye
Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Cantarella, Salimata Kamate, Thomas De Pourquery, Adama Diallo Tamba, Mariam Diop, Dado Diop, Charlotte Clamens, Seyna Kane, Coumba-Mar Thiam, Binta Thiam
Producers: Toufik Ayadi, Christophe Barral
Cinematography: Claire Mathon
Production designer: Anna Le Mouel
Costume designer: Annie Melza Tiburce
Editing: Amrita David
Sound: Emmanuel Croset
Production companies: Srab Films (France), Arte France Cinéma (France), Pictanovo (France), Hauts-de-France (France), with the participation of Arte France, Canal +, Ciné+, Les Films du Losange, Wild Bunch International
World sales: Wild Bunch International
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition); Toronto (Special Presentations); New York
In French
103 minutes