On the inhospitable shores of Berck-sur-Mer, France, where the sounds of the tide mingle with a woman’s breathless running, is where Alice Diop’s narrative-feature debut “Saint Omer” begins. It is a taught, bewitching court procedural, where pomp and circumstance, where the performance of the space, and the cold, calculating way it puts the most vulnerable on display, drags on to us an inevitable but no less stunning end.
“Saint Omer,” with devastating intent, recalls the real-life 2013 incident involving Fabienne Kabou leaving her 15-month-year old baby girl on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer, where her child drowned underneath the rising tide. In Diop’s assured narrative, Kabou is renamed Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman who originally emigrated from her Senegalese homeland to France to study law. Coly’s trial is seen through the methodical eyes of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor whose undercurrents will crash with this case with an intensity she can’t predict. In wanting to make this trial the centerpiece of her next project, Rama travels to the oppressively white town of Saint Omer, intent on finding a story. There she finds the ghosts of her past, and her fears for the future.
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Diop’s “Saint Omer” doesn’t condescend to the viewer by slinking toward black-and-white offerings of good and evil, or broad statements about race or gender. This ripped-from-the-headlines narrative accomplishes a feat far more creative, and a bit less forced. It dances on the surface of these participants, and in their subtle ripples, to reveal the humanity in the seemingly inhumane.
Similar to Joe Marcantonio’s horror film “Kindred,” in “Saint Omer,” Diop meditates on immigration, mysticism, Blackness and motherhood. These themes take shape through Rama’s gaze, an academic who is pregnant with her first child and is already sifting through the anxieties pregnancy can bring. When she steps out of the train station in the small northern town, her anxieties are heightened. She can feel the glare of the white inhabitants, of their scalding thoughts. In most modern Black films, this elegant tracking shot would succumb to serving as the launching pad for heavy-handed horror tropes. But Diop shows the kind of restraint inherent in a documentary filmmaker with an interest in relying on suggestion so she might allow the story to unfold organically.
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You get the sense, early on, that this narrative had the potential to be a documentary. Diop attended Kabou’s actual trial. But there’s a thematic depth here, nestled in Rama’s internal and intimate feelings, which this film gives breath to, that a documentary couldn’t. When Coly, for instance, enters the courtroom, the knowing lens makes note of her chains, how she must be pulled through like a dog, and the immediate dehumanization of her that it causes. Rama tries to watch without prejudice, but you can see her unease, ever so briefly, flood to the surface. It’s one of the incredible ways Kagame commands the frame — both visually and physically — with nary a line of dialogue.
In fact, we go long stretches without seeing her on screen. She often occupies the background of the composition. It’s a ghostly presence in a trial primarily about a ghost. The only times we hear from Rama are away from the stiff confines of the courtroom, in her hotel room, when she’s listening to her audio recordings of the trial. There, memories of her rough childhood with her mother return. It’s also where she considers the thesis of her project, which involves combining the events of the trial into the Greek tragedy, Medea. It’s a myth about a mother who murders her sons as revenge against her unfaithful husband. And it concerns madness and grief, and a foreign woman feeling trapped in a strange land that treats her as a foreigner.
While that burden is felt by Rama, it’s embedded into Coly, particularly in the conventions of the trial. The judge can ask pretty much any question they want. The barristers can go on long harangues that amount to “I have more of a comment than a question.” Meanwhile, Coly must stand at attention, in the box, throughout the proceedings, as she awaits to be slandered, to be leered at, to be dismissed. The rituals of the court create an exoticizing air — which comes through in the bold cinematography by Claire Mathon (“Spencer” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) — where the aim is to retraumatize rather than find the center of truth. The editing throughout the film by Amrita David is unhurried, and Diop trusts her audience, even if the audience might not trust Coly, especially when she claims that an evil eye caused her to commit murder. Malanda plays Coly as difficult to read in a mesmerizing performance where the emotions are hushed yet seismic.
Everyone is trying to get at the heart of why Coly did what she did. Did an evil eye really cause Coly to commit such an unthinkable act? If it didn’t, then how do we judge Coly? Should we judge her at all? And is she deserving of empathy? Diop crafts a film that provides few answers. But the lack of answers isn’t a glitch. It’s an empathetic feature, where the results of racism arise in tangled ways. Where losing your home means losing yourself. And where motherhood becomes a throughline between pains of each generation.
If any blemish exists in “Saint Omer,” the fault resides in the sonic storytelling. The score, composed of undulating voices, which has become the new shorthand for African mysticism, rarely matches the tenor of the on-screen events and sounds unoriginal in its tonality. And yet, a final needle drop of Nina Simone’s “Little Girl Blue” pierces the heart. While filmmakers often use Simone’s music to perform the emotional heavy lifting — a now stale and lazy tactic — the usage makes perfect sense here, as Simone, a Black woman who likewise emigrated to France, and struggled with mental health and motherhood, is the musical cipher of these women, with a needle drop effortlessly bringing every thematic tangent together.
And, in the film’s slippery and cathartic conclusion, when a closing argument allows all of the masks to fall off, Diop makes that connection clear: How stories and memories can collide to heal. “Saint Omer,” a captivating, soul-shattering work overflowing with gentle sympathy, begins with a woman running through the dark. It ends with her hugged in the light. [A-]
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