2023 Top Ten List #3 Saint Omer

 

Director Alice Diop

preparing courtroom scene

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.   

Touki Bouki

 

Beyoncé and Jay-Z recreation

 

TOUKI BOUKI (Journey of the Hyena)                   A-                                                             Senegal  (95 mi)  1973

Touki Bouki was conceived at the time of a very violent crisis in my life.  I wanted to make a lot of things explode.       – Djibril Diop Mambéty

An absurdist anti-capitalist fever dream taking place in post-colonial Dakar, a political satire heavily influenced by the French New Wave, given a Godardian twist of mystical unfathomability, considered, along with Med Hondo’s SOLEIL Ô (1967), to be Africa’s first avant-garde films, never settling upon any narrative form, instead becoming a fragmented series of randomly occurring events, shot almost exclusively outdoors in vibrant colors by Georges Bracher and Pap Samba Sow, using a jarringly different sound design with a radical use of music that adds additional meaning to the bold imagery, actually providing the film’s cutting edge, creating a different style of film.  Mambéty, the son of an Islamic imam, began making films at the age of 23 with no formal training in filmmaking, coming instead from a theater background, directing and producing five short films and only two features in his lifetime, but they are landmark films, offering a Brechtian assault to the senses, believing the role of a filmmaker is that of a griot, a traditional African storyteller imbued with wisdom and cultural awareness, viewed as a visionary.  Part of the film’s appeal, particularly on the African continent, is that it doesn’t have that polished film school look or a recognizable political agenda, yet it contains a combustible anger and force from the staggering originality.  His first feature is a perplexing road movie that passes through a rabbit hole juxtaposing modernity and tradition, showing a collision of cultures at odds with themselves, yet for the uninitiated they should understand there are very few films like this.  Using surreal Buñuel-style metaphors of cattle being led to slaughter (including brutally graphic slaughterhouse images), the film makes similar suggestions that the migratory path for economic opportunities from Africa to Europe through traditional colonial trading partners may be a bad idea, as Africans get devoured and eaten alive in wealthy capitalist economies, with Africans at the lowest end of the wage scale, ruthlessly exploited, relegated to manual labor while less skilled whites are given preferential treatment, offered the most hazardous jobs, subject to racist abuse and mistreatment, never finding that elusive freedom they were looking for.  Like Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), the film features a pair of criminal lovers on the run, Mory (Magaye Niang), a young cowherd living a traditional life bound by the economic restrictions of the land, yet he drives around town on a motorcycle adorned with a bulls skull and horns (a recurring African motif), and Anta (Mareme Niang), a liberated college student with closely cropped hair and dressed in pants, where she can easily be mistaken for a man.  With no money to speak of, they plan an escape on a ship headed to France, pretending to be rich Europeans so as not to draw attention, blending into the normal and everyday European reality, aided by hustling up some needed cash, where they can initially be viewed as throwing their money around in exorbitant tips.  Together they resemble a modern era Bonnie and Clyde (1967) of Dakar, neither one particularly likeable, dissatisfied with their own bleak lives, both fantasizing about their escape to a heavily romanticized version of France, exemplified by familiar refrains from a popular Josephine Baker song that repeats throughout, “Paris, Paris, Paris,” Touki Bouki YouTube (1:41).  Still recovering from a history of French colonization, made just 13 years after independence in 1960, still dependent upon French financing and equipment to make films, it’s ironic that what they admire most about French culture is wealth and status, the same social barriers used by the French to exploit Africans and keep them in their place.  Nonetheless, dressed in the latest fashionable attire, they view themselves as conquering heroes when they return, complete with a citywide ceremonial parade lauding their success, money lining their pockets, transcending the cycle of poverty that defines Africa.  Baker represents an iconic international star objectified by her race and gender, perhaps signifying an American exiled to France where she established a successful career that was never possible in America due to the hostile racial climate, yet here her black African roots are highlighted and culturally reclaimed with reverence and distinction. 

As relevant as ever, with thousands of young Africans caught in a relentless migratory pattern in pursuit of a better life in the west, risking their lives, often dying at sea, driven by despair and deluded hopes.  Made on a budget of $30,000, the portrait of life in Dakar is devastating, revealing a congested shantytown in Dakar with people literally living on top of each other, where there is a montage of brightly dressed young girls lined up at the communal water source to carry buckets of water on their heads, with Mory owing unpaid debts to seemingly everyone, resulting in one woman, Aminata Fall as Aunt Oumy, placing a hex upon him, vowing revenge, yet in their imagined utopian dream she’s the one offering platitudes welcoming their successful return.  The motorcycle, however, offers a symbol of African freedom and independence, showing little children chasing after it, like an elusive hope or aspiration, while the mixture of diverse sound and musical styles becomes the cornerstone of the film, adding an experimental dimension designed to shock the audience into a different awareness, allowing Mambéty to literally reinvent African cinema, perhaps epitomizing the contradictory paradoxes of cultural exchange between post-colonial Africa, Europe and America.  Departing from the social realist tradition of Ousmane Sembène, Mambéty frames Senegal as a nation in perpetual change, expressed in the highly unorthodox film aesthetic, where the two characters themselves are the picture of ambiguity and uncertainty, barely uttering a word to one another, continually keeping the audience off-balance, deflecting all expectations.  Whatever internal struggles that may exist for these two characters is overshadowed by the boldness of the jump cut editing, with little continuity between shots, creating a picture of fragmented images that only consolidate afterwards, becoming a unified whole.  Among the most noticeable capitalist signifiers are Mobil oil tanks, gigantic Renault car ads, and a luxury Mercedes Benz being loaded onto the ship.  One of Frantz Fanon’s warnings was predicting the colonized would act like the colonizers, treating their own in the same abusive way, which comes to pass when Mory has an ugly incident with a university group of Maoist revolutionaries who decide to violently mock and terrorize him, momentarily kidnapping him before subjecting him to torture, mirroring the grotesque early slaughterhouse images of cattle being herded into slaughter, with audible animal cries of horror quickly blended into children’s cries and the noises of Dakar, which include the Islamic call to prayers.  This merging of sound and image fuses together forming an African identity, suggesting it is shaped by a multitude of forces.  Another overt image is the ferocity of the ocean, with waves seen crashing against the rocks on the shoreline, which is what’s shown onscreen during the couple’s lone lovemaking scene, mixing ecstatic moans into the sounds of screaming seagulls and shorebirds, all merged into one natural world.  In a strange turn, they take a cab ride to the outskirts of town, viewed as a dangerous and inhospitable place, as the Europeans gather there in resort style accommodations, seen cavorting by the pool, where Mory quickly takes the place of another male consort, chosen at the whim of a queer French-speaking businessman (Ousseynou Diop, the director’s brother) who flaunts his wealth and seems to relish sleeping with the hired help, inviting Mory into his lavish suite, who quickly steals his clothes while Anta steals his wallet, now fully prepared to make their way to the heavily fortified shipping docks.     

Initially panned by the Senegalese public and press, it is now regarded as one of Africa’s greatest films, at #93 listed higher than any other African film in the 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll, Critics' top 100 | BFI.  Markedly different from most other African films, largely due to the fiercely independent and experimental style, absurdly paying its debt to Godard’s gangsters, echoing Western attitudes, where France is seen as a paradise on earth, little more than a mirage, repeated in the musical refrain from the Josephine Baker song, which only repeats the lyric “Paris, Paris, Paris/You’re a kind of paradise on Earth,” which is its own form of deluded wish fulfillment.  This sentiment was previously explored by Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noir de...) (1966), where a hired help’s dreams of life in France are dashed, feeling squashed and imprisoned instead of liberated, treated more like a slave, where she was expected to be “grateful” for the opportunity.  Perhaps the most absurd reference is a Tarzan-like figure, initially seen in a tree, later seen riding Mory’s motorcycle before coming to an unceremonious end in a crash, with suggestions that some outdated stereotypes need to come to an end and be put to rest as well.  Caught up in the winds of change, between the confining authority of local tradition and the extremely limited economic prospects at home, much of the film’s imagery is seemingly reflective of Mory’s constantly-in-flux state of mind, alternating between the internal and external, never offering a clear internalized view, where this is never about an individual character’s personal development but a nation’s changing identity, explored through absurdly heightened exaggeration and hallucinatory compositions, occasionally humorous, but more often devastating, where at least in their eyes, Dakar is immune to happiness and progress.  Told with a spontaneous exuberance, the final scenes are perhaps the most telling, making their way to the harbor, which has a rhythm all its own, including its own unique sound design, with lines of waiting Africans trying to get onboard, with derogatory racist commentary heard on the ship’s deck by well-educated white French passengers, including the abominable words of a cynical professor who finds a complete lack of culture and art in Senegal, holding views completely disassociating themselves from “Africa,” which they view with derision and contempt, dehumanizing the entire continent, showing their true colors.  But the film itself flies in the face of what he utters, offering proof of the contrary, where the stereotypical savages left on the continent may well be these white neocolonialists that hold firm to their prejudiced, sanctimonious views.  As luxury goods are loaded and classical musical refrains can be heard, Mory and Anta board as well, where she steps forward, but he hesitates, has a change of heart, not willing to really abandon his home, stepping backwards, leaving Anta aboard the ship while he dashes back through the city in a dizzying reassemblage of his confused identity, resulting in an extraordinary jazz fusion that is just sublime, TOUKI BOUKI YouTube (5:29).  Yet we’re left with a profound sadness and moral frustration, with each heading for opposite shores, their futures completely uncertain, with Mory discovering his crashed motorcycle laying on the street surrounded by blood, grabbing what’s left of the broken skull and horns, left sitting all alone to dwell in his own existential thoughts, as the giant passenger ships in the harbor heading to Europe are replaced by smaller crafts that reflect the Dakar influence, touki bouki (1973) - final song YouTube (4:32).  A seminal work in African cinema, and key to the establishment of a new, post-colonial identity, misappropriated by Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the summer of 2018, again using Africans as a colonialist commodity, vowing allegiance to the almighty dollar (raking in a quarter of a billion dollars for themselves in just 4 months), restaging the film’s iconic image for their On the Run II world tour (SMPS-PRT-2018101115440.pdf).  The sad truth is that little has changed in nearly half a century, where the lure of the west continues to be an elusive dream that desperate lives are driven to follow.