There are both a good idea for a movie and a great idea for a movie tangled up right next to each other inside of Saint Omer, and it is one of the more disappointing developments of the young 2023 movie year (the film is technically a 2022 release in the U.S., but only in the most narrow, legalistic sense) that it has definitively chosen the merely good idea. And moreover, it seems obvious that director and co-writer Alice Diop, a documentarian making her narrative feature debut, never really considered the other possibility.
The good idea focuses on Rama (Kayjie Kagama), a literature professor and novelist living and teaching in Paris. She’s of Senegalese descent, and currently pregnant with the child of her white partner, and the questions of her identity both racially and as a soon-to-be mother have been gnawing at her in an indistinct but troubling way when she encounters a news story about a different French woman of Senegalese descent, who is about to go on trial for the murder of her 15-month old child, born to a white father. Seeing in this story a terrifying but compelling funhouse mirror version of her own life, Rama travels up to Saint-Omer, almost as far north as you can go in France before you hit the English Channel and the North Sea, to sit in on the trial, in the hope that she can turn it into a novel that updates the myth of Medea for the present day As one of the few brown faces in a sea of white, mostly white women, Rama is immediately aware of her own complicated role as spectator, and she starts to see the woman on trial as a kind of “what if my life had gone just slightly in a different direction?” case study, while also finding that the confluence of her own pregnancy and this grisly tale of infanticide is making it impossible for her not to start being plagued by memories, bordering on hallucinations, of her very difficult relationship with her own mother.
That is, again, a good idea. It is a very French idea, the kind that’s so fascinated by philosophy, theoretical models, articulations of theme, and cumbersome classical resonances that I have an extremely hard time imagining how it could ever avoid disappearing entirely up its own ass, but part of the reason we go to French art films is because we are willing to deal with a director’s auto-proctology if it leads us someplace interesting. And I think Saint Omer can and in fact does go someplace interesting, although I also think that there’s a low ceiling on how interesting: the genre of professionally successful academics deciding to view the entire world in terms of how it functions as a mirror of their own neuroses is one that’s always going to make me impatient, and not only is Rama all of that, she’s a very direct author-insert for Diop herself, who did in fact travel to Saint-Omer in 2016 to witness the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who murdered her child in exactly the same way that we hear related in the film. Indeed, the script by Diop, Amrita David, and Marie N’Diaye includes enormous swaths of transcripts from the trial, and Diop has stated that part of the impulse to make the film came from wishing there had been an audio-visual record of the trial (there were no cameras allowed in the courtroom). So the whole of Saint Omer is itself a fractal version of its own story; it is Diop’s attempt to record, in cinematic form, the feelings that sitting in that space stirred up in her back in 2016. The whole thing is naval-gazing nested inside naval-gazing, and it’s so intellectualised as to end up being a bit drearily abstract
But anyway, I think that’s a good idea for a French art film, and it held my interest right up until Rama enters the courtroom, and the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) begins. And this is a great film. Diop’s instincts as a documentarian-turned-narrative filmmaker are obvious, and perfect: once Rama sits down to hear the beginning of the (white lady) judge’s (Valérie Dréville) interrogtation of Coly, Saint Omer completely shifts gears to present a 45-minute sequence of real-time courtroom testimony, question-asking, and attempting both to find facts and then to present those facts in enormously slanted ways. It is absolute masterpiece-level filmmaking: Diop’s handling of this is ruthlessly objective, using the flattest possible angles and encouraging all of the actors to keep their line deliveries calm and even. Claire Mathon, working hard to cement my impression that she’s my favorite cinematographer to break out in the last ten years, continues her tour of masterpieces, following Atlantics, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Petite Maman, and Spencer with a swerve in a completely different direction from any of them, filming the inside of the courtroom with a flawlessly-controlled minimalism. She’s working essentially with nothing but shades of brown, sculpting little gradations in the same way that a ’40s cinematographer would paint in a thousand sharply-defined shades of grey; but the goal here is never to create beauty, just a suffocating feeling of the institution, with the handsome and lifeless wood grain of the French legal system flattening Coly against the wall that seems to swallow her up.
But for all that I continue to love Mathon, the real star of the show is the editing, also by Amrita David (the screenwriter-editor is not hyphenate I’d expected to see, but given my feelings on editing as the foundation of cinematic storytelling, I can’t say that it feels wrong). The courtroom scenes in Saint Omer are the best-cut scenes I have seen in any 2022 production, full stop. They are a miracle of showing without telling. Diop and Mathon are both treating this in a thoroughly clinical, detached way, refusing to put any sort of emphasis on the material; David provides that emphasis. As we listen to long, long stretches of people speaking in measured tones, she stalks around that courtroom, looking at faces, leaving no sense at all that they are connected to each other: the edit turns the trial in a universe of isolated souls, each with their own way into this room, some less valid than Rama’s and some more, but all of them with the same amount of preconceived notions, all with the same independent responses to what they hear. And David’s edit lets them all briefly take control of the film. The whole thing becomes less about what is being said than who is responding to it, what individual words are accompanied by a cut to a given person’s face, crafting moment where a sentence gains its meaning – about race, about sex, about motherhood, about the law, about morality – for absolutely no other reason than because the edit has been shaped to lead us only to that meaning, like a professional magician forcing a card on us.
It’s not even the best part of the courtroom sequences! That honor I would reserve for Malanda, whose performance is absolutely crushing, an inscrutable mixture of almost sociopathic evenness (this is a woman who could kill a child), vibrant humanity and deep sympathy (how could this woman kill a child?), and all without being allowed to do much at all to modulate her voice. She’s playing both a specific woman who committed a specific crime, and she is also The Experience Of African-Descended Women In France, and somehow having to bear the weight of the latter doesn’t forestall her ability to continuously remain grounded in the former.
Malanda is so great that she ruins Saint Omer. No, seriously. One of the biggest reasons that “let us peer into the courtroom and contemplate this woman’s story as the editing continuously revises our POV and forbids us from ever landing in one place or thinking about this from one perspective” is a great movie, and “a well-to-do-professor thinks about her own life while wacthing a court case” is only a good movie is that Malanda’s performance is a staggering powerhouse, and Kagame is perfectly okay. There’s nothing wrong with what she’s doing. Five years from now I can imagine spotting her in some film festival screening and thinking “oh, she was good in something. That thing. What thing was it? But she was good in it”. But she’s not as good as Malanda, and Rama isn’t as compelling a figure as Coly, and “what does this professor feel” is as a result a rather blunt and unwelcome trade down from “what are the cultural and political and psychological forces that were swirling around in this woman’s mind when she did that?” And so it’s probably inevitable that Saint Omer would deflate hard every time it leaves the courtroom, or that it would end up collapsing altogether in its last 20 or 30 minutes, when it has to ignore Coly’s story in order to resolve Rama’s, and also stops over for a completely deadning direct-address monologue by a moralising lawyer that I hated as much as I adored the earlier courtroom material. In short, Saint Omer is working extremely hard to snatch mediocrity out of the jaws of high art, and I am frankly very discouraged by how close it comes to succeeding.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
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