Certificate: 12A (upsetting scenes, sexual violence references, infrequent strong language). Running Time: 123 mins. UK Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
WHO’S IN IT?
Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Canterella, Salimata Kamate, Thomas de Pourquery, Salih Sigirci, Fatih Sahin, Atillahan Karagedik, Ege Güner, Mustili, Lionel Top
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Alice Diop (director, writer), Amrita David (writer, editor), Marie Ndiaye (writer), Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral (producers), Claire Mathon (cinematographer)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A writer (Kagame) sits in on the trial of a woman (Malanga) who is accused of murder…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON SAINT OMER?
On paper, a film like Saint Omer shouldn’t work. The first narrative feature by documentarian Alice Diop is a textbook example of how to completely throw out one of the most fundamental aspects of filmic storytelling: show, don’t tell. There are several long stretches of dialogue that describe in detail a number of events that, in theory, the audience should be seeing on a screen rather than hearing about it. Furthermore, the film goes out of its way to be as uncinematic as possible, with a majority of the movie taking place in a small handful of locations, often shown in long continuous takes that rarely, if ever, have any variety to them.
And yet, for something that you’d think wouldn’t fit amongst the constraints of film, Saint Omer is profoundly cinematic. Diop miraculously finds a way to turn an extremely wordy and routine legal drama into a compelling study of numerous societal issues – among them motherhood, immigration, race, class, and mental health – that, in its own way, could only be told through the visual storytelling power of film.
The film is based on a real-life court case that Diop herself attended in 2016, that of a Senegal-born woman named Fabienne Kabou who was convicted of infanticide after leaving her baby daughter to drown in the rising tide, and whose real-life transcripts Diop incorporates into Saint Omer. Here, though, Kabou’s movie avatar is a young student named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), whose trial is attended by Diop’s own fictional stand-in Rama (Kayije Kagame). In Diop’s narrative, Rama is an academic who intends to find inspiration from Coly’s trial for a modern-day retelling of the Ancient Greek tragedy of Medea, but as she hears Coly describe the events leading to the eventual murder of her infant child – as well as conflicting statements from several others, including the much older man who fathered the child – she discovers a much closer connection to her subject than she first realises.
Diop’s background in documentary filmmaking is utilised in rather clever ways in this semi-fictional narrative. As stated earlier, much of the film is basically a dramatization of the real-life court transcripts from Fabienne Kabou’s trial, with Guslagie Malanga’s Coly saying verbatim practically everything that her factual counterpart uttered during her own cross-examinations. However, where Diop manages to seamlessly blend both drama and documentary is in how she presents the real-life testimony; choosing to capture this trial in long, often unbroken static shots, in a small but fancy courtroom with dull natural lighting, Diop and cinematographer Claire Mathon (who also shot Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire) force a profound focus on Coly as she presents a perspective filled with contradictions and vague references to supernatural scapegoats, which Malanga recreates through her quietly commanding performance. Although what we’re hearing is predominantly factual, recreated from the devastating real-life case, the filmmaking gets effective mileage out of minimalist dramatic techniques that lend it a natural visual language, through which it can say enough while also appearing to say very little.
As the audience, along with Kayije Kagame’s Rama, becomes more and more engrossed in the testimonies and shocking tangents within this trial, Diop also introduces a striking collection of societal issues that are addressed and explored through the filmmaker’s carefully chosen moments. Motherhood, and the psychological ramifications that come with it, is one such topic; Rama is pregnant during the film, but in early scenes with her family she is shown to be physically uncomfortable around her own mother, who in childhood flashbacks is shown to have been somewhat neglectful, and hearing in the present the circumstances to which Coly did to her own baby causes her to worry even more about what kind of mother she’ll turn out to be. Through her numerous on-screen avenues, Diop develops a vulnerable collage of motherhood that categorises each example from this trial and her own experiences, but presents it in ways that make it feel quite universal, especially to mothers who have similar worries about their own methods of parenting.
The film inevitably brings up racism, as well as the media’s bias against her status as a Senegalese migrant, to suggest greater societal reasons for Coly’s doomed case. At one point, Coly is questioned by her former tutor why she sought to study a German philosopher rather than someone from her own culture, while lawyers later ponder if the investigating judge’s sympathy towards her claims of witchcraft is a blind acceptance of racial stereotyping. For Rama, her initial intentions to rework Coly’s story into modern-day Greek tragedy are no more exploitative than the various sensationalised news stories covering the trial – something that Coly’s mother (Salimata Kamate), also present at the trial, seems to all too oddly be proud of, particularly as she buys up as many newspapers as she can with her daughter’s name in them – which Diop gently condemns while also pointing out her own character’s complicity in furthering such exploitation.
It’s a very different kind of courtroom drama, one that makes very few detours from the real-life case but, through an astounding mix of fact and fiction, has the power to make its viewers think about more than just who or what concept is on trial. Diop’s firm and focused filmmaking leaves you silently breathless, in ways that only the most compelling films of its kind can do – which, once again, for a film that is predominantly tell over show, is a rather fantastic achievement.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Saint Omer is a brilliantly executed legal drama unlike any other before it, one that sees filmmaker Alice Diop combine narrative fiction with her natural documentarian techniques to compellingly dramatize the real-life transcripts of an actual court case, largely portrayed through long takes focused heavily on Guslagie Malanga’s quietly commanding performance, and through a riveting portrayal of complex themes in modern society, from motherhood to racism.
