‘Saint Omer’ Overview: A Quietly Momentous French Courtroom Drama

In 2016, within the courtroom of Saint-Omer, a small, untouristed city off a D-road between Calais and Lille, the trial passed off of a younger Senegalese Frenchwoman accused of murdering her child: an act so completely antithetical to accepted concepts of motherhood and womanhood that it’s inescapably thought of the “worst of all attainable crimes.” The lady, a PhD scholar with a reported genius IQ and a aptitude for flamboyantly mental French, confessed however claimed sorcery as the actual wrongdoer. It’s the sort of true story that presents an apparent alternative for a delicate social drama given to sober, sorrowfully goal observations concerning the perilous, tumbling vortex of sophistication, gender, ethnic and cultural points through which it performs out. “Saint Omer,” the deceptively austere, terribly multifaceted fiction debut from documentarian Alice Diop, shouldn’t be that movie. 

As a substitute, positioned on a mesmerizingly regular axis stretching, as if alongside a fascinated gaze, between the defendant and a courtroom observer based mostly on Diop herself, “Saint Omer” challenges accepted concepts of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity — and even of what cinema will be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t settle for these accepted concepts. Cast within the hypnotically absorbing, painterly lengthy takes of Claire Mathon’s inscrutably calm digicam, edited by Amrita David with an intimacy that feels at instances just like the sluggish thump of your heartbeat inside your individual head, the movie inhabits an incredibly unusual and unhappy story from the within. From the attention of that storm of -isms and points, the place it’s eerily nonetheless, it’s the chattering judgements of the endlessly mediated world outdoors that really feel harmful, undisciplined, even loopy. 

This courtroom drama begins in a college classroom, the place Rama (Kayjie Kagame), a profitable novelist, is lecturing on Marguerite Duras. She speaks of the way in which the “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” screenwriter, via her artwork, may translate the state of disgrace conferred upon the shaven-headed “collaborator” ladies of World Conflict II, right into a state of grace. Later, Rama and her companion Adrien (Thomas De Pourquery) go to her household for a dinner at which Rama’s strained relationship along with her mom is clear. Already now, maybe via the peculiar alchemy of Kagame’s beautifully nonetheless and watchful efficiency, the tiniest flicker can present volumes of data. When she and Adrien are requested what sort of transforming job they’re planning on their residence, it’s not fairly clear how we all know that Rama’s fast evasion alerts concurrently that it’s a child room, that she is pregnant, and that she doesn’t need her household to know — however we do nonetheless. 

After a quick dialogue along with her writer, who provides his blessing to her mission a couple of minor trigger célèbre infanticide trial — one Rama intellectualizes as having resonance with the traditional Greek fantasy of Medea — she arrives in Saint Omer, and is seated within the courtroom when the defendant, Laurence Coly (a riveting Guslagie Malanda), takes her place on the stand. Lit by Mathon like a Rembrandt portrait in an ocher cardigan towards the wood-panelled courtroom partitions, after which left alone to occupy lengthy, uninterrupted takes, Laurence provides her thought of, lucid, completely disingenuous testimony over the subsequent few days. It’s laborious to imagine she was working below the magical affect of some evil-eye possession, and never simply due to secular skepticism about curses and witchcraft. Inside a girl this chillingly self-possessed, how would there be room?

She is questioned with brisk however not unsympathetic directness by the choose (Valérie Dréville). Discrepancies in her story are spotlit by the prosecuting counsel (Robert Cantarella). Her older, white, married lover — the daddy of the murdered child — contributes his self-serving account of their relationship. And he or she is sometimes redirected by her protection group, led by Ms. Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), whose spine-tingling summation is among the many solely whole-cloth innovations of the screenplay, co-written by Diop, Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye, and largely reworked from the transcripts of the particular trial. However all through all of it, the actual connection that evolves is between Laurence and Rama, whose unreadable but someway vividly obvious reactions work again and again to dismantle our preconceptions as hers, too, endure sluggish, lurching revolutions. There grows in Rama, additionally a Black Senegalese French mental in a relationship with a white man, carrying a mixed-race baby, an insistent, horrified identification. 

Every so often, a second within the trial obliquely cues a childhood reminiscence of Rama and her mom. Quietly and crisply offered, these sequences — “flashbacks” appears too crude a time period — are once more nearly preternaturally evocative. In a single such, her mom wordlessly washes up the bowl she has simply been utilizing, units it and a field of chocolate-milk powder down in entrance of her younger daughter and leaves with out as soon as her. The chilly choreography of this routine, a paltry act of barely sufficient care, is a mini-essay in alienated, mutually uncomprehending familial relations, as is a scene throughout a court docket recess, when Rama and Laurence’s mom Odile (Salimata Kamate), who can be attending the trial, have lunch in a close-by café. “This should be very troublesome for you,” ventures Rama gently, earlier than noticing the horrible satisfaction that Odile appears to absorb the media’s tacitly condescending protection of her daughter’s articulacy and comportment. 

It’s a subtly radical act to put us in Rama’s viewpoint, from which vantage we helplessly observe how the fixed rumble of covert racist prejudice invades even this scrupulously run courtroom, clouding any understanding of Laurence’s advanced, presumably sociopathic humanity, and eradicating her company, nonetheless perverse and harmful that company could also be. When Laurence’s PhD advisor takes the stand and talks of discouraging Laurence from pursuing a thesis on Wittgenstein as a result of she’d be “hiding behind a philosophy that’s not about her” — as a result of anybody from an African background may solely ever be pretending at perception into the good Austrian thinker’s work — it’s laborious to inform if the jolt of pure rage comes from Rama or from inside your self, however by then there may be little divide. To really feel what Rama feels, which is to really feel what Diop feels, is a paradigm-shifting privilege, maybe particularly when the sluggish, deepening scorch of “Saint Omer” is about each how little we are able to ever actually know anybody, and the way it’s solely via the fixed effort to take action that we’d a bit of higher come to know ourselves.