SFor a few years now, novels about infanticide have been appearing in France. There was Leila Slimani’s 2016 Then Sleep Too, for which she received the Prix Goncourt and which was about a nanny as the perpetrator. Then, in 2021, Marie NDiaye’s “Rache ist mein”, in which a mother killed her own two children, told from the point of view of her lawyer.
Now Marie NDiaye has also co-written a screenplay. Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” tells the story of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) who abandons her fifteen-month-old daughter on the beach in the northern French town of Saint Omer just before the tide. The girl drowned and was found by a fisherman the next morning. The trial revealed that apart from the father, a much older man with whom Coly lived, no one knew anything about the child’s existence, neither the authorities nor the family.
Alice Diop was in the courtroom
It is the first feature film by 44-year-old director Alice Diop, who was previously known for her documentaries. Two years ago, she won the Encounters prize at the Berlinale for “Nous”, a film about residents along the RER B railway line around Paris.
In “Saint Omer” she also retains many documentary qualities. The film is based on the true story of Fabienne Kabou, how the main character in the film came to Paris from Senegal to study, who killed her daughter in Saint Omer in 2016 in the aforementioned way. Alice Diop took part in the court process as a spectator at the time. In the film, her alter ego is a writer. Rama (Kayije Kagame) wants to write her next novel about the trial.
“Saint Omer” also focuses entirely on the court process. It shows neither the child nor the deed, but begins with Rama, the observer. She lives with her boyfriend in Paris. Her family, like the defendant, is from Senegal. One of the first scenes shows her at a family dinner. She’s obviously unwell, and she’s also hiding something: she’s four months pregnant.
The film interweaves the stories of the two women. Rama is reflected in the accused, she seems to recognize parallels that frighten her. At the same time, “Saint Omer” thinks about motherhood in general, about the associated fears, challenges and dangers, which are unequally distributed depending on where you come from.
A kind of root cause analysis
By showing the accused and their statements, their demeanor and the behavior of the other parties involved very precisely towards her, the judge, the prosecutor and some witnesses, the film conducts a kind of causal research. The fact that Laurence Coly committed the crime is never up for debate, she herself has confessed from the start. At the same time, she pleads “not guilty”.
She herself does not understand why she acted this way, she hopes that the trial will help her to understand. Once she names witchcraft as the cause, her lawyer speaks of delusions. The film omits the verdict, because that’s not what it’s about. He seems to be keeping a secret, not presuming to fully penetrate the story.
He only hints at many things, never becoming explicit or even striking. In a few sentences and scenes, he shows everyday racism. There is Rama’s publisher, who is surprised at Coly’s good French, or the philosophy professor, who does not understand that Coly wanted to do her doctorate on Wittgenstein and not “on a topic that is closer to her culture”.
At first glance, “Saint Omer” is a simple, almost austere film. He sets small, reserved accents that break through the documentary sobriety. Through the eerily hypnotic music that makes Rama’s fears palpable and at the same time passes them on to the audience; or through the many intermedial references, the excerpts from Pasolini’s Medea film, the Mona Lisa on the wall at Rama’s family. In her lecture, Rama talks about Marguerite Duras’ “Hiroshima mon amour”, describes the “violence of the images in an almost lyrical song”. Diop interrogates, never pretentious, images of women and mothers along with her own film images.
It is certainly also due to this carefully crafted, sometimes poetic but never euphemistic approach that the film won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice and the César for Best Debut, it is also France’s nominee for the Oscar. So where does this not only French fascination come from for an act that can be considered the most difficult to understand and that nobody really likes to deal with? And why should the audience voluntarily expose themselves to these stories?
The answer to both becomes apparent in “Saint Omer”: because this motif tells about so much more, about the relationship between women and men, about equal opportunities and their opposite, isolation and discrimination, parent-child relationships, oh, actually about the whole thing Company. This is one of the reasons why this film is so strong and so clever.
In the cinema from Thursday.