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| Director Alice Diop |
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| preparing courtroom scene |
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| beach in Berck-sur-Mer |
SAINT OMER A France (122 mi) 2022 d: Alice Diop
I was obsessed by the story and almost drawn to it like a magnet, but I didn’t have the idea to make a film. But when I went to the trial, I was confronted with the reality of this woman—the way she was, the way she spoke, the complexity of her story, the impossibility for me of understanding her act—and I didn’t have any more clarity at the end of the trial. And this mystery that remained forced me, I have to say, to go into my own hidden depths and to look inside myself at things I didn’t necessarily want to see or acknowledge. It was very upsetting. —Alice Diop, from Devika Girish interview by Film Comment, October 10, 2022, Interview: Alice Diop on Saint Omer - Film Comment
Diop’s first narrative feature is a haunting study of subjectivity after working for nearly two decades making documentary films on contemporary French society, where the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker has explored similar concerns of immigration, gender, blackness, colonialism, and class, examining the historical repercussions of French colonization in the waves of immigrants coming from northern Africa, becoming a mirror and observational study of our own society. Born in France, with a Masters in history and a Doctorate in visual sociology, Diop is perhaps best known for her award-winning documentary We (Nous) (2001), making radically different social realist films that exude a lucid intelligence not often found in cinema today, merging the probing detachment of Frederick Wiseman with the investigatory inquisitiveness of Raymond Depardon, where this courtroom drama is reminiscent of Depardon’s THE 10th JUDICIAL COURT: JUDICIAL HEARINGS (2004) or 2017 Top Ten List #10 12 Days (12 Jours). With a camera similarly fixed on the judge and the accused, evoking subjective responses and concerns not typically seen in courtrooms, French judges have a wide latitude to personally interact with defendants appearing before the court, which actually humanizes their interests far beyond the courtroom, extending into broader, universal themes, capturing the imagination of the filmmaker, who acknowledges, “The situation in which I’m living is a form of reparation of history. That I, a child of descendants of colonized people, am now representing France with this film—it’s a kind of irony of history, a way of repairing history.” Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at the Venice Film Festival, the acclaim for this film has only grown, becoming France’s nomination for Best International Feature, a captivating portrait of motherhood amid cultural isolation, telling the true story of Fabienne Kabou, a young Senegalese immigrant from Dakar studying philosophy in France, who, in 2013, intentionally left her 15-month-old daughter to drown on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer at high tide, allowing the waves to carry her away. Diop attended her trial in 2016 while pregnant with her first child, recognizing a similar Senegalese heritage, both impregnated by white fathers, where colonial implications creep into the proceedings in unexpected ways, following in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967), looking behind the masks of the men who committed monstrous crimes. The key to the film is a methodical dismantling of expectations, calling into question ideas of identity and identification, as this woman is judged not only for her actions, but also for her culture, gender, and race, yet all efforts to make sense of this atrocity are in vain, transcending any judgment or interpretation, offering a unique window into the immigrant experience, with the filmmaker providing her own personal insights that she is uniquely positioned to understand. Written in collaboration with Amrita David, the film’s editor who also attended Kabou’s trial, and acclaimed author Marie NDiaye, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Claire Denis for White Material (2009), a uniquely different take on French colonization, this bears a structural similarity with Dreyer’s epic silent film THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) and Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1961), both utilizing actual court transcripts, while the trials were meant to publicly persecute the defendant as a way of preserving an imposed moral order, with English law prevailing in 15th century France, while contemporary French law subordinates any African cultural connections. In the subtlest of ways, this film recalls Frantz Fanon’s first publication in 1952, Black Skin, White Masks, which exposed how French language was a dehumanizing political and cultural tool to control colonial subjects, and nowhere was that more evident than in courtrooms, where racial oppression was the means to historically maintain white domination over the French colonies. The French colonial expansion into Senegal and West Africa dated back centuries, trafficking African slaves to the Caribbean colonies as early as the mid 16th century, with Dakar becoming the capital of French West Africa, a federation of eight French colonies. While Senegal formally achieved their independence in 1960, the French continued to place themselves into prominent positions of power. Colonial subjects had historically been banned from making their own films, so Ousmane Sembène’s Senegalese film Black Girl (La Noir de...) (1966) was one of the first to express the entrenched psychological effects of colonialism from a black African point of view, where this follows in that tradition, uniquely immersed into the contemporary fabric of French society.
In an intriguing psychological abstraction, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, the character of Fabienne actually overlaps into two characters, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, who in real life holds a degree in art history), the defendant in the courtroom who stands accused of infanticide, brought in handcuffs each day, freely admitting to killing her 15-month-old daughter at the beach, yet mysteriously believes she is not to blame, contending sorcery is involved, a reference to African primitivism, and Rama (Kayije Kagame), an alter-ego of the director, a writer and college professor seen early in the film giving a lecture on Marguerite Duras, who wrote the script for HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959), an avant garde film by Alain Resnais where a French actress has a doomed love affair with a German soldier during the war, accused afterwards of collaborating with the enemy, seen publicly having her head shaved and paraded through the streets in humiliation, exactly as they did to Renée Falconetti in her portrayal of Joan at the end of Dreyer’s film. Rama is 4-months pregnant with her own biracial child, and has a complex relationship with her own Senegalese immigrant mother, feeling a deep personal connection to Coly while sitting as a silent witness in that courtroom. Early in the film Rama can be seen in her mother’s apartment, framed by a photo of her as a child and an image of the Mona Lisa, a da Vinci painting hanging in the Louvre that has become synonymous with French culture, whose unreadable gaze of impassivity is surrounded by an air of mystery, offering a parallel to Laurence Coly, whose persona is equally obscure, described as “a phantom woman.” Initially Rama plans to incorporate material from the trial into a new novel, a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but events in the courtroom take an unexpected turn, learning more about Coly’s life and the isolation she experienced from her family and society while living in France, becoming increasingly anxious about her own life and pregnancy, leaving her emotionally overwhelmed. Part of the mystifying beauty of the film is that there are no definitive answers, as spirituality has always been conceptualized differently by Western and African cultures, yet it plunges us into the emotional abyss of Coly, contending she has bad dreams and hallucinations, a misunderstood woman who herself fails to comprehend how it happened, “I don’t know. I hope this trial can help me understand.” Like so many immigrants and their children, immersing them into a culture that is not their own forces them to lose a part of themselves, eradicating their history, their language, their clothes, their customs, even the food they eat, along with so many of the helpful signs and symbols that connect them to their ancestors, leaving them stranded on an island where they are forced to cling to Westernized ideals for the answers, often finding it a hollow vessel. Meticulously shot by cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also shot Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) and 2019 Top Ten List #2 Portrait of a Lady On Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), and Mati Diop’s (no relation) Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019), taking place in the town of Saint Omer where the actual trial took place, it is filmed almost entirely in the courtroom with a documentary style, featuring prolonged shots from fixed positions of the judge (Valérie Dréville), defense attorney (Aurélia Petit), and prosecutor (Robert Cantarella), with the judge always ordering the defendant to stand when being questioned, while witness testimony is intermixed with shots of Rama passively watching the proceedings. Certainly one thing that stands out is the cultural blindness and racial animosity on display in Coly’s depiction by the prosecutor, evoking his patriarchal privilege by reflecting a profound negativity that borders on a smear campaign, using language as a weapon, mirroring the Bresson film, viewing her as a menace to society, matched by the explosive coverage from the media, making all the newspaper headlines, projecting all their Westernized fantasies, where she is nothing less than a monster in the public’s eyes. The judge is more sympathetic, tactfully summarizing the often contradictory evidence and police testimony, always offering the defendant an opportunity to respond in her own words, with Coly speaking in such a deliberately composed manner, openly acknowledging “A woman who has killed her child cannot expect any sympathy,” becoming a chilling portrait of her troubled life, taking refuge with a man thirty years her senior, Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), whose testimony is nothing less than appalling, insisting these were “the happiest moments in his life,” yet he keeps her away from his own family, leaving her completely isolated and alone, even delivering her baby alone at home.
A film of placid exteriors, where something inexplicable is lurking under the surface, part of what makes this film so successful is the stunning intimacy it achieves, with the camera zeroing in on the seemingly impenetrable face of Coly, showing few signs of emotion from the continuing diatribe from the prosecutor who attempts to vilify her in public, yet only ends up creating a smokescreen of obfuscation. We learn from Coly’s testimony that she is educated, well spoken, and felt cared for as a child, but there was always an emotional distance from her mother Odile Diata (Salimata Kamate), who was often away from home due to her work, but it was not just that, as they had little in common. Her mother forbid her from speaking her native Wolof language and instead pressured her to sublimate herself into the French language, only caring about her academic success, sending her to France to become a lawyer, yet when she chose to study philosophy instead, the family cut off all support, forcing her to become dependent on a much older white man who kept her invisible, always keeping her at a distance. When Rama meets Odile in the courtroom, they have lunch together, yet what interests Odile is that her daughter is making a good impression in the courtroom with her politeness and good vocabulary, pleased that her French fluency is viewed in all the newspapers as intelligent and sophisticated, completely disconnected with the emotional turmoil associated with her daughter’s crime. Rama astutely senses all the assumptions of how Africans are perceived, no doubt reflected in her own upbringing, as whites are often confused when the eloquence of African immigrants does not fit with their ingrained perceptions, yet she has enough insight to ascertain that Coly only sounds like an educated woman, hinting that something is empty deeper inside. Both Coly and Rama keep secrets from their families, with Coly never mentioning her newborn, while in Rama’s earlier visits with her own family, interacting with her mother and sisters, she never mentions that she’s pregnant. With the camera lingering on long takes of Coly’s face, the deeper question remains why such an intelligent woman would do such an incomprehensible thing. Only once does she appear rattled in the courtroom, when one of her college professors dismisses her ambition to write a doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein, claiming she was “hiding behind a philosophy that is not about her,” and should have chosen someone closer to her own culture, an exclusionary view that not only devalues her intellect, but suggests cultures cannot intermingle, alluding to Western superiority. As she witnesses the racist condescension in the courtroom, Rama is deeply affected on a personal level, reduced to tears at one point, walking through a wave of demonstrators outside the courtroom protesting the barbarity of a child murder, with flashbacks resurrected like ghosts of the past, having a strained relationship with her own mother (Adama Diallo Tamba), recalling having a bowl of milk and powdered chocolate placed in front of her as her mother quickly leaves the room, where there is nothing but silence between them. In an even more startling flashback, as a young girl she witnessed her mother’s extreme anguish living in France, seeing her in a daze, sitting alone on her bed staring off in the distance, before very carefully, and purposely, putting on each piece of jewelry, as if to ward off evil spirits, reflecting an unspoken sadness of being a stranger in a strange land. As if to accentuate that sense of isolation for viewers, the Wolof language spoken by the African mothers remains unsubtitled. While trying to comprehend the underlying mysteries surrounding the case, as if probing the subconscious for answers, Rama watches clips of Pasolini’s MEDEA (1969) on her laptop, an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, with Maria Callas offering a mad sense of operatic grandeur, elevating a child murder to a level of myth. Guslagie Malanda exhibits a surprising restraint in the role of Coly, where her emotional reserve is the focal point of a film crafted with humane austerity, so when her defense attorney makes an eloquent plea in her defense, we are struck by the sheer beauty of her remarks, a rumination on what it is to be a woman, daughter, and mother, unleashing a tsunami of emotions. It recalls something Rama says earlier in her lecture about Marguerite Duras, “The woman, an object of shame, becomes, thanks to the author, not only a heroine, but a human being in a state of grace.” In a remarkably inspired choice, Diop utilizes the consummate artistry of Nina Simone, whose mental health struggles epitomize her own immigrant experience, providing a heart-wrenching canvas of melancholic poetry, Nina Simone - "Little Girl Blue" ("Little Girl Blue" High Fidelity Sound) YouTube (4:18), carving out the emotional terrain that finally offers needed attention to that broken woman who stands before us, embracing her complexity, and her humanity.
