Director: Alice Diop
Writer: Alice Diop and Amrita David
Stars: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, and Valérie Dréville
Synopsis: Follows Rama, a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court to use her story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don’t go as expected.
While watching Saint Omer (2022), it is important to consider the fact that Alice Diop worked as a documentarian for fifteen years before making the transition to feature filmmaking. This is a film that reflects her personal investment in the hot button issues at hand. While addressing the racial divide that exists within French society, she also steps back to consider the responsibilities that artists take on when tackling real life stories. Diop finds a way to ground a story about infanticide in the slightly less controversial discourse that surrounds journalistic ethics and it’s fascinating to watch, especially as the scope of this story expands. It is exceptionally rare to see a courtroom drama that draws on the works of Marguerite Duras for inspiration and even rarer to see a film that fully commits to incorporating formal experimentation into its narrative.
From the outset, we are invited to view modern-day Paris through the eyes of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant professor of Senegalese descent who feels like she has been ‘othered’ by her Caucasian peers. She is forced to contend with racial micro-aggressions on a daily basis and worries that her child will be forced to endure similarly vicious abuse. In her spare time, she begins to write a new novel. After hearing about the story of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a poor Senegalese immigrant who committed infanticide, she is inspired to produce a modern retelling of the story of Medea. In order to provide a more accurate portrait of the context that surrounds Coly’s case, Rama travels to Saint-Omer to observe her trial. Coly’s heartfelt testimony causes her perspective on the event to shift and, as time goes by, she realizes that she and Coly have shared many of the same life experiences.
Diop makes the bold decision to insert several elisions into a narrative that already tests its audience’s patience by playing out at such a gradual pace. The process of piecing together information that is occasionally revealed in an offhand manner is initially challenging. We never gain a strong sense of Coly’s moral character and find ourselves grappling with the Big Issues while trying to get a handle on the smaller details. Our participation in the investigative process ends up mirroring the journey that Rama goes on. Even for viewers who stand at a slight remove from the issues at hand, it’s impossible not to feel implicated in this case. We are put in the position of a storyteller and forced to consider the fact that we bring a lot of baggage into our consideration of controversial figures. We are asked to question our assumptions about this woman’s upbringing and the influence that cultural traditions have on her behavioral patterns. Diop can also be credited with respecting her audience enough to let them draw their inclusions and one is never made to feel that they are watching a henpecking diatribe that doesn’t make effective use of film grammar.
In many regards, the screenplay serves as a counterpoint to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), a cynical satire about the state of yellow journalism in midcentury America. Wilder viewed the film’s protagonist, Chuck Tatum, as a charismatic anti-hero who is willing to lie, cheat, and steal in his efforts to further his own career ambitions. Rather than developing empathy for the subject of his latest article, Tatum single-mindedly pursues the shallow, materialistic rewards that have been promised to him if he takes advantage of them. Saint Omer charts a very different course to that picture, in that it suggests that writers have the ability to view their sources of inspiration through a humanistic lens. Without implying that the writer-muse relationship is entirely incorruptible, Diop argues in favor of artists who wish to take real life events and transform them into art. She takes a long, hard look at a tricky situation and finds a way to extract a faintly optimistic conclusion from it.
There is much to admire here and Diop’s approach to telling this story does command admiration. If one were to offer up a mild critique of her directorial technique, they might note that this material has been presented in a relatively dry manner. There are plenty of viewers who would contend that displaying this content in any other way would diminish its impact. This French arthouse flick would suffer if it had been puffed up with traditional melodramatic tropes or flashy star turns, but I don’t think that it’s entirely unfair to question whether Saint Omer could have captured an even more dynamic and propulsive energy.
Grade: B-
