Courtney Howard // Film Critic
SAINT OMER
Not Rated, 2 hours and 2 minutes
Directed by: Alice Diop
Starring: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Thomas de Pourquery
As is the case with most French films, filmmaker Alice Diop’s SAINT OMER isn’t so much interested in judging the character it literally puts on the stand, but rather in the consequences that have taken a toll on her. This drama, centered on a pregnant novelist observing the trial of a Senegalese woman accused of infanticide, features provocative themes ruminating on female generational trauma and the racial imbalance of who’s afforded grace and mercy. However, its elongated run time and need to overly spell things out wears on its audience, taking a toll on its emotional impact.
When we first meet Parisian Rama (Kayije Kagame), she’s teaching her students a history lesson on humiliated women, branded forever as objects of shame. Only, as she sees them, they’re in a state of grace. Anyone who’s ever seen a film knows the trope that whenever there’s a teacher on screen, the text being taught will likely be telegraphed through the filmmaker’s own subtext. And sure enough, it is here. Rama’s looking to center her next novel on decoding the Medea Myth – a Greek tragedy where a spurned woman kills her two kids – and has found the perfect subject on trial in tiny, picturesque Saint-Omer.
Thirty-something Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga) stands accused of concealing the birth of her baby girl and then drowning her in the ocean at 15 months old. While she doesn’t deny she committed this unfathomable act, she can’t remember why or how she did it, stating that sorcery is at the root of the cause. As the lawyers and judge intrusively demand Madame Coly pore over the details of her life, from her debatably happy childhood to her questionable student immigration to France, the details take a toll on Rama, who’s in an emotionally vulnerable headspace at 4 months pregnant and missing her musician husband Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery).
Diop and co-screenwriters Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye thread the needle perfectly, establishing Rama’s own fears and self-doubts in addition to personal struggles with her immigrant mother. Those issues only compound further when similar tribulations are reflected right back at her by Laurence’s admitted problems with her mom Mrs. Dietta, who’s observing from the sidelines. As we see the chasm between Rama and her own mom in flashbacks, as well as Mrs. Dietta’s overbearing care for Rama when dining together, the picture’s oppressive emotional scale and scope widens.
Outside of the maternal angles, the filmmakers also take great care and craft showing the disparities between how Laurence is heard by the all-white jury, lawyers, judges and audience versus how those testifying against her shade her character as a manipulative liar. And when she does defiantly speak out of turn, to defend herself when her lawyers stay quiet, the micro-aggressions piled on top of her are genuinely suffocating. It’s clear she seeks understanding from those in a place to grant it to her, but they’re unwilling due not only to her unlawful, aberrant actions towards a helpless dependent, but moreso to ingrown, systemic prejudice. The invisibility she later speaks of is mirrored in her skin-tone wardrobe, browns and beiges acting both as a blank canvas and a further projection of her identity.
It’s a shame, though, when some of the film’s overarching sentiments are telegraphed through pesky exposition. Worse, in the climactic 3rd act, the film pauses to view a movie Rama is watching on her laptop – one that, while it serves as an explainer of the Medea mythos, is too on-the-nose especially that late in the game. Plus this scene eats up more time when it could be excised to get to the satiating conclusion.
Grade: 3.5 out of 5
SAINT OMER plays AFI Fest on November 6. It’s distributed in the United States by Super LTD. No U.S. release date is listed yet.
