With her narrative-feature debut Saint Omer, documentarian Alice Diop wants audiences to care about a child murderer. It’s a tall order — even fellow inmates tend to look down on those who are incarcerated for harming a child. But certain viewers may find themselves actually feeling empathy for someone who put an end to her 15-month-old daughter’s life.
That’s what Senegalese woman Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda) is on trial for. She’s accused of leaving her baby girl out on the beach, allowing her to be swept up by the tide. Although it’s something she admits to doing, Coly pleads not guilty, citing — among other things — insanity brought on by “sorcery.”
Technically, this isn’t Coly’s story. The real protagonist of this film is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a Paris-based literature professor and novelist, also Senegalese, who travels to the titular French town to observe the trial. She’s rounding up material for her next project, a modern-day adaptation of the Greek Medea myth. But as she listens to Coly being grilled by the concerned judge (Valérie Dréville) and the opposing barristers (Aurélia Petit, Robert Canterella), Rama becomes concerned — she begins seeing a lot of herself in the accused.
Diop went through a similar ordeal when she attended the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, a woman who was convicted of leaving her child to drown. (Just like Rama and Coly, both Diop and Kabou are of Senegalese descent.) With Omer, which was selected as the French entry for the Best International Feature Film at this year’s Oscars, Diop — ever the documentarian — takes a dry, straightforward approach to re-creating the emotions that were stirred up during that case. With most of the movie taking place in a courtroom (the same courtroom where the actual Kabou trial took place), those scenes are usually captured in lengthy, static medium shots, mainly set on Coly. Some might see this as mundane, prosaic, even dull. But this is Diop’s way of laying out all the details in a meticulous — but still dramatic — fashion.
It’s here where Malanda does some sad-eyed, quietly devastating work. She plays Coly as a woman who’s more lost than evil, someone who’s seen her fair share of stress and agony, much of it from her disapproving mother. Her fate was sealed even before she gave birth to a child whose father — a married 50-something white man (Xavier Maly) — she claims never wanted the kid.
As the other young woman of color in the courtroom, Kagame’s character teeters between brainy confidence and visible unease. She plays someone whose ego and intellect can’t hide the awkward anxiousness that surfaces when things get too real. Between the rocky relationship with her mom and the mixed-race kid she’s about to have, even the sight of Coly giving her an empathetic smile from the witness stand freaks her the hell out.
Diop never lets us forget that these two strangers are sistas in the struggle. With Coly fighting for her life in an all-white courtroom and a distraught Rama wandering among pale-faced people outside, Diop is always reminding us that these two are often drowning in a sea of dismissive whiteness. And yet, by the film’s end, Diop turns this story about two Black women into a story about all women. The climax, in which Petit’s barrister addresses “the jury” by talking straight into the camera, has close-up shots of white, female faces in the courtroom tearing up. Just like Rama, they can’t help but get emotional about this lonely, disturbed woman’s story. This woman was in pain and obviously needed help. Sadly, no one answered the call, and things went horribly wrong. It’s something I’m sure most women have dealt with at some point in time.
“In a way, us women, we are all monsters,” Petit’s barrister tells the jury/camera. “But we are terribly human monsters.” By providing a dramatic, loosely based retelling of a heartbreaking trial, Saint Omer pulls off an impressive feat: It inspires you to have sympathy for the devil.
