Saint Omer
Directed by Alice Diop
Running time: 2hr3 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Guslagie Malanda (right) in Saint Omer
At the start of the pandemic, when group simul-watching of films from home was a fresh way to forge a feeling of togetherness, my friends devised a weekly schedule based on genre: a set time for romcoms, erotic thrillers and so on, for whoever was in my mood. “Legal Mondays” were for courtroom dramas, which turned out to be reliable comfort viewing in unstable times: the courtroom drama proceeds quite literally according to established rules and regulations, delivering climax and catharsis exactly where you want it, usually with a shouty, fiery speech of impassioned righteousness.
Saint Omer, the staggering first narrative feature from French documentarian Alice Diop, is a courtroom drama that wouldn’t really have fit in on Legal Mondays. It discomfits and provokes by bending and breaking the genre’s structural rules, in turn inviting its audience to consider who the judicial system is designed to benefit and protect. The case at its centre, pulled from 2016 French headlines, ostensibly seems open-and-shut: Laurence Coly (the extraordinary Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant on trial for the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, candidly admits that she left the infant on a beach to be claimed by the waves. The prosecution pounces. Coly pleads sorcery, that she was under the influence of a spell; as played by Malanda in a performance of intense, unblinking composure, her haunted stare cutting through various legal formalities, it’s hard to tell what she believes and what she’s merely doing her best to make herself believe.
The mostly white French courtroom audience isn’t buying it, but one Black woman in it is stilled and rattled by Coly’s unwavering testimony: Rama (Kayjie Kagame), an author and literature professor also of Senegalese origin, who journeys from Paris to Saint-Omer to write about the trial. She sees echoes of the myth Medea in Coly’s story, though the longer she spends witnessing the defendant, the less fitting her distanced academic interpretation seems. Instead, she sees flickers of her own life in Coly’s — the drift and insecurity of African immigrant identity, the brisk practicality of motherhood amid that unrest, the weathering of racism in all contexts from everyday micro-aggressions to systemic (in)justice.
Diop doesn’t spell this out for us: she lets Claire Mathon’s watchfully poised camera, and the astonishing pair of faces under its gaze, do the heavy lifting. Saint Omer is a film about witnessing, and not of the take-the-stand variety: rather, it sees how the passive process of listening becomes an active one of mirroring, of identification, of understanding the occasionally unthinkable. The law doesn’t work that way; for the sake of cold, hard fairness, it cannot. But calmly testified facts aren’t always the entire story. Diop writes strangers’ shared histories into individual tragedy; Saint Omer teems with voices even when it’s pristinely, devastatingly quiet.
SAINT OMER (2022) Written by Alice Diop, Amrita David, Marie N’Diaye | Shot by Claire Mathon | Edited by Amrita David