A Senegalese immigrant and PhD student who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to drown, Saint Omer’s Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) is infamous before she enters the courtroom. Photojournalists swarm her, and with their flashes on, put her under literal overexposure before the judge shoos them out. Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor of literature and the daughter of Senegalese immigrants herself, is attending the trial in hopes of writing her second book about it — pending title, Medea Castaway. In her hotel, her publisher calls her to let her know how much buzz the book already has, but that she should consider a different title; not enough people are familiar with Greek tragedy. As Saint Omer will show, to be unseen and unheard is not the decay of myth, but where it truly flourishes.
This is director Alice Diop’s first narrative feature after a decade’s worth of documentaries. Danton’s Death (2011) and On Call (2016) are great pictures that tackle clear issues — Black masculinity and institutional racism within France’s theatre industry in the former, undocumented migrants’ struggles against medical bureaucracy in the latter. Diop trusts the viewer enough to pick up on the broader narrative on their own; what little narration she supplies is as an interlocutor to her subjects’ stories.
Saint Omer is based on the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, for which Diop was a spectator. Fiction is necessary for her to depict the trial directly, and it also gives her the distance to study her own technique. Amrita David, who has edited all of her features, has joined her as co-writer, along with playwright Marie NDiaye. Montage is at the heart of Saint Omer’s story: it’s how Rama can have an active role in Laurence’s trial just by listening.
The film begins with the shadowy Medea figure framed from behind. What might initially be viewed as a prologue is revealed to be within Saint Omer’s present as we cut to Rama, awake in bed. Her husband Adrien (jazz musician Thomas de Pourquery, himself playing a touring musician) is there to console her from the nightmare, which to the audience retains a sense of ambiguous horror. Has Rama’s unconscious made her a spectator to an event otherwise closed off to everyone’s memory, including the perpetrator’s, or has it put her in the Medea figure’s place? At a family dinner, she’s forced into formulating a vague explanation for why she can’t drive her mother to an appointment the next day. Adrien tries to dissuade any filial guilt; an unresolved mother/daughter rift is hinted at. More duplicity upon arriving at the Saint-Omer courtroom, when Rama stays as the journalists make their forced leave, her thumb sliding onto voice memos’ record button. While she doesn’t stand accused of anything, Rama exudes culpability.
Whereas before she had her chance to speak in public, Laurence is the site of the press’ myth-making, once she is called to the stand it becomes clear that her infamy is the only fact we can be sure of. Laurence has already confessed — but to determine culpability requires more than that. The trial is here to ascertain her motive, and that entails her childhood, her beliefs (“you claim to espouse Western values,” the judge condescends), and her adequacy as a mother. With such daunting questions being posed, perhaps the best response is Laurence’s: “I don’t know.” Never wishy-washy, those three words are her only defense against the court’s insatiable appetite for truth. Her evasive rhetoric confronts how the public has inflated her importance: “Even a dead-drunk idiot could’ve done what I did. And people say that I’m intelligent. So, why did I do it?”
Time and again we return to this question, and to the same shot of Laurence, plainly dressed, cast against the courtroom’s chestnut wall. Cinematographer Claire Mathon, who has proven herself to have a sense of light’s density within limited, often banal locations (she sells Petite Maman as a modern fairy tale in making the film’s forest a character of its own) reveals the most minimal difference of colour’s vibrancy. What little light peeks under the blinds is given an alien intensity as it shifts over Malanda’s face. She delivers a transfixing performance, each word breathlessly meted out.
We can see beyond the facts to what draws Rama to Laurence: the same reason one goes to see the Mona Lisa, to see the object of one’s desire and truly believe it was looking at you first. Indeed, the rituals of the proceeding force Laurence into a statuesque position. Standing for questioning, her hands rest on the railing enclosing her, always in the same position. Her fingers stretch outside its borders as they clench and caress. Her elbows are always bent about 120 degrees — that tense position achieved when someone commands you to relax. Only twice during the three-day proceedings is she allowed to remain seated; suddenly she is submerged under the railing. The camera peers over, forever unsatisfied in her absence.
Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), father to Laurence’s child (and a man old enough to be her father), takes the stand, letting us know how much she is hiding — and how little he knows. He introduces a conflict not just between “the facts” but between styles of performance: Dumontet is dignified in his meekness, confused by the court rather than confusing it. Laurence’s mother (Salimata Kamate), whom we earlier see becoming a maternal figure to Rama over lunch, also testifies. The addition of the two witnesses to the trial, along with the occasional interjections from those presiding over the case, end up feeling superfluous: surely these are necessary for a legal drama, but as Saint Omer makes it obvious early on that it’s more than a legal drama, the form ends up as a constraint.
The specifics of language are impeded by Diop’s intuition for visual storytelling. (And aptly enough, while Laurence doesn’t know why she did what she did, she knew something had gone wrong in the preceding months…) Diop is fascinated with empty spaces: after Rama leaves her hotel room, we linger on a medium shot of its desk with laptop and books scattered on top, its chair empty.
Laurence is an empty space in her own right, and this fact which Saint Omer uses to reveal Rama’s guilt and France’s racism comes with the film’s refusal to genuinely tell her story. Laurence’s personal details are shared with Rama, the story’s real subject. What little resolution Saint Omer offers is weighed in favour of the latter of the two. Laurence could be filled in as Rama writes about her; the first day’s testimony is played on repeat as Rama attempts a first draft of Medea Castaway.
The act of filling is inherent to Saint Omer’s pacing: as its high tide approaches, dream flows into reality and subject into object. If a direct answer won’t appear in the course of the trial, Rama seems to find one in the preludes to primal scenes with her mother. The act itself, of the violent separation between mother and daughter, is never shown here; the omens pointing to it are more than enough. The audience is deprived of an objective viewpoint, having to rely on their echoes: echoes which come as calls for Rama and Laurence to relive their experiences in each other. Over the crowd’s ambience, the sound mixing privileges inhalations and cleared throats, intimate sounds which unite the pair. Once the tide reaches its peak, the waves crash down in total silence in a moment of totally submerged subjectivity. And as the tide ebbs back, Diop plays it a little too slow and a little too safe — effectively returning to the university lecture hall and the consoling husband — but no explanation can take away Saint Omer’s traumatic beauty.
