Saint Omer begins at a university where Rama (Kayjie Kagame) lectures on Marguerite Duras and her screenplay to the 1959 romantic drama film Hiroshima mon amour. Duras’ work examines female characters who have committed deplorable acts, but she doesn’t judge, instead recognizing their complex place as both wrongdoers and victims whose stories deserve to be heard. Saint Omer sees the infamous, real-life 2016 case of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese-French woman who left her 15-month-old child to drown at a beach in Berck-sur-Mer, in this same way.
Rama attends the trial, attempting to write a book that fits the Greek myth of Medea into the case. While on the stand, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), the fictionalized version of Kabou in the film, confesses to the crime but pleads not guilty, citing “sorcery” as the cause of her incomprehensible actions. Despite Coly’s perplexingly enigmatic nature, Rama recognizes parts of the woman’s story that are present in her own, including living as a Black woman in France, a strained relationship with her mother and fears about becoming a mother herself. As the trial progresses, it focuses less on the woman in question and more about the burden society puts on mothers and Black women in particular. Diop explained that she decided to make a film about Kabou when she observed how all the women court attendees were visibly moved by the case. There existed something universal about her difficult experience with motherhood where all sorts of barriers were placed in front of her – racial and socioeconomic – that made a tragic story inevitable.
While the details of the trial sound like a sensational true-crime Netflix drama, Diop captures the events with a notable amount of humanity, asking us whether she deserves empathy. As a solely documentary filmmaker up to this point, Diop deliberately chooses to observe the performers in her direction, allowing room for the narrative to challenge our projections of the characters. Some may dismiss this style as artless, but it’s evident that each sequence is carefully crafted. Take the closing statement of Coly’s attorney, Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), as she asks the court for empathy towards her defendant. Diop shoots Petit in an extended close-up, highlighting the visceral nature of her appeal to female solidarity.
Likewise, cinematographer Claire Mathon takes a measured approach. On the first day of the trial, Mathon shoots Coly straightforwardly, isolating her in a mid shot as she stands statically looking left to the judge offscreen. However, as the case proceeds, Mathon begins to implement sudden shifts in perspective where a slight variation in facial expression or body language or an exchange of glances has the power to drastically change how we see Coly and her reasons for committing the crime.
As Coly gives her testimony, we learn that her mother, Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), pressured her as a child to be the ideal Frenchwoman and did not allow her to speak Wolof, her native language. This cut her off from making friends and finding community. When she grew older, Coly escaped to France but only ran into more problems. She changed her field from law to philosophy – a decision that her father didn’t approve of and led him to stop supporting her financially. Without a home or money, Coly moved in with her much older lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly). However, Dumontet kept Coly a secret from his wife and family, and when she became pregnant and was later raising the child, he was not there for her. In the end, with no one to turn to, she decided to free herself from motherhood.
Saint Omer is ultimately not a trial film – it ends before we see the verdict. Whether Coly is guilty is not important. Instead, the film offers us an opportunity to understand a woman who is invisible to society. With Rama, Diop asks how a woman becomes a mother when her own has a history of buried pain and violence. In centering its narrative around Coly and Rama, Saint Omer is inherently political, demonstrating how Black women can express universal aspects of womanhood.
Photo courtesy of Super LTD
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