Rent Saint Omer (2022)

What Testimony Can't Reach - Saint Omer review by griggs

A subject this incendiary should feel impossible to approach with calm, yet Alice Diop does exactly that. The courtroom is dense with testimony, but the film is really about what testimony can’t reach: glances, pauses, the weight of something that may never fully make sense. Diop directs with empathy and an almost unnerving patience, refusing the easy route of judgement or sensationalism. The beauty is quiet and strange, right through to a final scene that lands like a deep breath you didn’t realise you were holding.

Powerful and gripping portrayal of a highly disturbing real-life court case - Saint Omer review by PD

Alice Diop's highly original film adapts the court transcripts from the 2016 infanticide trial of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman of Senegalese descent, in which a fictional stand-in for Diop appears in the form of young novelist Rama. To write her next book on the subject of the Medea figure (a woman in Greek myths known for murdering her offspring to as revenge against her lover), Rama travels to the town of Saint Omer to observe the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant and student convicted of leaving her 15-month-old child, Baby Elise, to drown at sea. A pregnant professor of Senegalese descent, Rama notices the parallels in hers and Coly's background, which begin to stir up some unwanted fears about motherhood as well as her memories with her mother.

The cinematography harvests the humanity from the sustained takes, fixating on the judge, the accused, the witnesses, and Rama as one of the courtroom observers. The shots hone in upon their expressions, as the defendant and witnesses absorb cross-examinations spoken off-camera, as if each person has a universe existing inside of them. And in providing an individualised approach, we become keenly aware of the societal imbalances that exist in the mosaic of dialogue. The camera does not harden Coly, the defendant, into a Medea monster, nor does it soften her into a paragon of "victimhood", and Guslagie Malanga portrays a woman with her own complexities searching to assert her existence. When Coly claims no memory of the incident, the judge clocks in that Coly remembers the tides rising on her limbs, to which Coly retorts that there are some things that can't be explained. These literal discrepancies may seem self-deluding, but we also gather this is the range of her truth as she understands it. When Coly's white and much older lover (and father of the child) is called to the stand, his testimony is revealing. Xavier Maly plays him as a grieving father, but the camera also has us confront how he ducked behind privilege to confront the palpable problems in his relationship with a younger Black woman, whose world only started shrinking when she had a child that remained unregistered. By illustrating these social undercurrents, the film exposes the fissures in the French court. Burrowed under Coly's and her lover's testimonies are systemic injustices that French society would rather shove under the carpet, the film peeling back the curtain on how society formulates judgments according to a person's race and cultural background while absolving itself of the systemic flaws. The lifeblood of this racism is clear in the French news coverage fixating on Coly's elegant French and a testifier accusing Coly of hiding behind a Wittgenstein philosophy because she did not choose a philosopher "of her culture."

"Saint Omer" says much about the psychological and societal impact of invisibility, starting with the invisibility of the Senegalese immigrant community (i.e. forcing them to erase their culture to assimilate) in French society. This invisibility extends to both Rama and Coly, who have a shared history of fraught relationships with their immigrant mothers. So Rama's meeting with Coly's mother has a very strong impact, such as when she pegs Rama as pregnant and boasts how she raised Coly to be decent and respectful in French society. We feel Rama swallowing her discomfort, as if she senses this mother forbade flaws in her daughter, even if her maternal teachings came from a place of love and immigrant self-preservation. Interspersed delicately with the proceedings are Rama's childhood reflections, not told through traditional-feeling "flashbacks" but a history lyrically knitted into the present.

It says a lot for the filmmaker that there is no straightforward 'good vs evil' or simplistic statements about race or gender on display here, nor is it concerned specifically with the verdict. In so doing the themes on display are very powerful indeed. Gripping stuff.