Saint Omer

dir: Alice Diop

2023

This is a tricky film to review. Tricky. It’s hard to talk about, even though it’s a very straightforward movie.

It’s in French mostly, and it centres around… members of the Senegalese community living in France.

If you had no idea what the film was about, the first fifteen minutes would be baffling. I knew what the film was about, and was still amazed at how our introduction into the story is done.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is an academic at university and a writer, and though she is French born she is Senegalese by culture and background. We get a few details of her life, like that she has a (Caucasian) partner (a beefy chap who’s apparently a bass player in a band), but there is something something at odds with what we’re seeing, a tension. At a moment where the family are together for lunch / dinner, bass player boyfriend seems like he’s about to announce some happy news, but Rama squashes it. Her sisters ask her if she can take their mum to an appointment, and she, not even looking at her mum, announces she won’t be around to take her anyway.

We don’t know where she’s going, she hasn’t told us or any of the other characters yet, but they must already know. We have some flashbacks, to a time before her father died (as they watch an old video tape?), and then her as a younger girl, in short, abrasive moments with her mother, who is later on referred to as a “broken” person.

After a train trip to some town, presumably the Saint-Omer of the title, she has something of a strange routine in a hotel room. She clearly isn’t comfortable in the hotel room, something about the bed squicks her, but she is prepared. The film makes sure we watched her pack a sleeping bag, which we later on watch her spread out over the bed.

Still none the wiser we watch Rama walk into a building, file into a court room, and then sit in the gallery to watch a trial. Everything transpires in the most naturalistic of ways – you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie about a court case, you feel like you’re watching an actual court case.

A woman is on trial. Is there a connection between Rama and Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), the defendant? We don’t know, the women don’t acknowledge each other.

So, assumptions abound, at least on my part. What is their connection? They’re both Senegalese women living in France, although Rama is French, Laurence is an émigré, and that’s about it. Only one other woman shares their background in the room. Everyone else is…I don’t even know what the term would be – Francaise blanc, perhaps, like a varietal of French white wine?

They are all pale people, is all I’m saying. I don’t have a problem with white people generally, but the film, without saying anything explicit, is still saying something, something pointed, I think.

The judge is a woman, the defence advocate is a woman, the prosecutor, the tip staff, the people watching the trial, the jury – are they a cross section of French society, of Saint Omer society? I don’t know, but they don’t look at all like these Senegalese women.

The flick doesn’t really leave us in doubt as to what happened – it’s not a mystery, it’s not a crime drama. It is a drama, arising from a crime, but it’s not the same thing. The court reads out statements, and the defendant gives long, affectless responses which sound like court transcripts from a trial BECAUSE they are court transcripts from a trial – the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a French-Senegalese woman accused of drowning her baby girl, in 2013.

The director of this film here, who usually makes documentaries, sat in that court room, all those years ago, and watched the trial, watched Fabienne and the French legal system at work. So, are we to surmise that Rama in the court room is a stand in for the director?

I guess that’s a simple enough assumption, but this isn’t a doco in and of itself. I think director Alice Diop is trying to represent something more complex than “here’s a bunch of stuff that happened, and these things were said, and here’s how you should feel about it.”

There are definite choices being made, scene composition, stylistically, performance-wise, that imply or represent various themes and ideas without underlining them, the connections are up to us to make. If Alice was struck by Fabienne’s responses, she clearly wanted us to be struck by Laurence’s responses (through Guslagie Malanga’s flat, but somehow compelling, and mesmerising performance) here. There is a distance, there’s a tension, there’s an unknowability as well.

When Laurence talks of her loneliness, of the fact that she never really got along with her own mother, never felt like she was close to her or understood, we wonder if Rama wonders the same thing about herself and her mother. Our only inkling of this is the way in which Rama listens back to a recording of the trial, and lingers over particular passages. They may not share similar lives, and have definitely taken different paths, but they have a shared dislocation, a same status of “other” in French society, which seems to bring an existential discomfort to both of them.

I could not help but think about a different woman, an author, who spent a lot of time in court rooms, and wrote books about her experiences, and in her case it was a woman of a different nationality, but who’d similarly tried to drown her children which caught Helen Garner’s eye. I’m not talking about her book This House of Grief, about a father who killed his sons by drowning, but instead the essay “Why She Broke: The Woman, her children and the lake”, about Akon Guode.

Like Fabienne / Laurence, Akon Guode had tenuous, precarious living circumstances, and not a great deal of support, and was living with severe depression, post-natal and otherwise after surviving the traumas of the Sudanese civil war. And then did something unthinkable, which killed three of her kids.

It’s unthinkable, unexplainable, but then it happens, and while rare (compared to the sheer quantity of men, fathers, ex-partners that murder women and / or their children as revenge for their former partners daring to escape), it happens. So it may be unthinkable, but then clearly it becomes thinkable to some people, some women, at some crucial point in time.

In vain the court struggles to understand her actions. No-one, including Mme Coly, disputes that what happened happened (a baby is dead), no-one else abandoned the baby on a beach to drown in the incoming tide. As horrific as that is, she can’t explain why, other than she must have wanted to be free of her. The unthinkable became thinkable, but then did the inexplicable become explainable? How does her extreme loneliness explain this?

No. It must have been sorcery. How else to explain it? She speaks of the moon giving her a clear silvery path to the beach, of the water coming in much later, but then that contradicts her other statements to police, saying the water was up to her knees, or that it was planned and impulsive, somehow. Even with full admission, what could she be lying about, according to the prosecutor, and why? Why when she’s already doomed herself. As she herself says of her time in prison thus far “When you’ve killed a baby, you don’t get a lot of sympathy.”

Does she want to be understood? Does she yearn to be understood? Do many or any of her actions before or after the murder make any sense? Can they be understood?

The film doesn’t tell us, and I think different people will draw their own conclusions to all of this, to any of this. To some the enormity of the crime precludes being able to think anything other than that the mother responsible is a monster and deserves everything she gets. The fact that she was a lonely Senegalese woman in France, cut off from any community, in some strange relationship with a man who was embarrassed by her, and pretended she and the baby didn’t exist, mitigates nothing.

I can’t argue with that. But I don’t have to take it on board either. In general, and specifically, I can pretty much say I am not supportive of people killing their own kids, or anyone else’s either. But this isn’t a crime issue (even if the crime is the issue that creates the drama). We all agree, it’s a crime. It’s the inability to explain what we do and why we did it beyond the moment in which we sometimes do things, there’s the rub, that’s the crux of it all. Afterwards we rationalise, we wonder, we might say a whole bunch of stuff, but maybe we are unknowable even to ourselves.

Maybe wondering whether sorcery was involved is less an attempt to use the supernatural to get a lighter sentence for ourselves, and more an admission that we don’t sometimes or often know what the fuck we’re doing, even when it comes to the most banal or terrible of things.

Rama, as the director’s stand-in, struggles mightily with what’s colloquially called morning sickness, but it seems to happen at any time of the day, and it seems more to be the burden she carries even being a witness to this trial (though not a witness for the trial).

Listening to the proceedings is taking a physical toll on her, as she keeps wondering / fearing whether everything will be okay with her baby, whether she’s capable of something as terrible as what Laurence did. It’s a terrible weight to carry for someone so young. It’s so handy that she has a laptop with her, and can relax and watch Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea starring Maria Callas, in order to chill out.

My, my, I wonder if she (the director) is drawing parallels between that version of Medea, and her crimes, and what Laurence did?

You be the judge. I mean it, you have to be the judge; you’re being asked to understand what can’t be understood by a person you don’t feel like you can understand because she’s so unlike yourself. The big “R” word is never vocalised, is never used, but it hovers over the court proceedings. Different counsels (the French legal / court system is very different from what we expect with the British / American / Australian model) argue about how “other” Senegalese culture must be (meaning “backwards”) from proper French society, so maybe killing your kid is something they just do, like using certain spices in your cooking or Female Genital Mutilation. You know, the usual cultural stuff.

When quizzed as to why she ever came to France in the first place, the court doesn’t seem to be able to believe that a Senegalese student could be so interested in philosophy, let alone the philosophy of Wittgenstein, that she could ever have aspired to study and then achieve anything as a scholar or an academic because, you know, hey, she is Senegalese after all. It’s said in such a dismissive, condemnatory way. As if any other students, no matter how “French”, never went to uni with half-formed aspirations that they never got to realise.

I wonder what the most important scene is, and there are probably plenty of them, yet they don’t act as skeleton keys that unlock a narrative or lead to a dawning of understanding, a flood of meaning. Maybe the crucial scene is where Rama and Laurence’s mother share a meal, and Madame Diata (Salimata Kamate) tells us how important politeness was in Laurence’s upbringing, far more so than love or connection, apparently. And her delight in the coverage in the papers. Or is it the fact that she correctly intuits that Rama is pregnant, and claims she has a gift for it, when the court proceedings we’ve watched indicate she never knew her own daughter was pregnant, or had a baby, at all.

Or is it the scene where Laurence, after being stared at for ages by Rama, finally makes eye contact with Rama, and, after the longest moment, changes the set of her mouth, not quite smiles, but indicates something. It’s maybe not sisterhood, it’s maybe not even Senegalese solidarity, but it’s a moment of something. Some moment of connection.

Or is it the defence attorney’s final statements? That speech she gives at the end leaves almost every woman in the room devastated, including Laurence, utterly devastated. And me too. It is heartbreaking stuff, but I think it’s something that strikes at the core of any mother, as it was calculated to.

I think a lot of people would be horribly bored by this flick. I think a section of viewers would be horribly affronted by this movie, with its implication that a Senegalese woman who killed her own kid doesn’t deserve a sympathetic portrayal, doesn’t deserve understanding, doesn’t justify being seen or heard as a human or a person, as anything other than as a monster.

I can’t argue with rock solid logic like that.

I don’t think we lose anything in trying to understand people, see things from their vantage point, even if we don’t succeed.

Surely we shouldn’t stop trying?

8 times there are parts of this flick both chilling and reassuring out of 10

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““Madame Coly, why did you kill your daughter?”
- “I don’t know. I hope this trial can help me understand.” - Saint Omer