Saint Omer
On my favorite film of 2023
The first time I watched Saint Omer was the week of its New York release. Given the themes vaguely described in the synopsis—motherhood and morality—I figured I’d likely enjoy the movie. Little did I know that a year later, I’d still be ruminating on the story and the electric questions it posed. Inspired by the real-life court hearings of Fabienne Kabou, Saint Omer focuses on the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese woman who killed her baby, and Rama, a French author who observes the case for a book project. As the narrative switches back and forth between long scenes of the proceedings and emotionally dense memories of Rama’s childhood, Diop draws the audience into the lonesome complexities of motherhood and the darkness it can conjure in women, especially those whose lives are drastically shaped by colonialism’s fierce reverberations.
The bulk of this two-hour film takes place in the belly of a courthouse. The brightness of day and the way it hits the room’s pleasing, wooden walls bring each subject and their acute world of expressions into perfect view. The camera grants no distortion or concealment, not for the jury or the judge, nor for the gallery of witnesses and onlookers, and especially not for Laurence Coly. From the moment she appears, it is difficult not to be rapt by her. Besides the natural curiosity of her circumstance, Laurence—played by Guslagie Malanda—with her poignant gaze and poetic speech, has an undeniably mesmerizing presence. Her audience, both on-screen and off, encounters her brazenness, her contradictions, and the most intricate parts of her shame in a manner so personal that, at times, it feels like we are not observing Laurence at the witness stand but rather with her inside a confessional. Every person in the courtroom, alert and wide-eyed, seems to be united by the same pressing question: Why did Laurence Coly kill her baby? When the judge directly asks her this at the start of the case, Laurence responds by saying, “I do not know. I hope this trial will give me the answer.” This reply, so full of nerve and surprise, seems at first inappropriate, but then, of course, what else was she supposed to say? Perhaps the real shock is the truth within this statement and how plainly she admits to it. Even the judge is taken aback. At this moment, the audience comes to realize that Laurence is in the room for the same reasons we are—to unpack her motivations and come closer to the core of the truth. Why did Laurence Coly kill her baby? She wants to know too.
In contrast to Laurence, we have Rama. Played by Kayije Kagame, Rama is a character defined by her silence. A sharp, gripping silence that dissipates a visceral sense of tension and separation. This distance she creates between herself and others is most present when she is with those closest to her, specifically her mother. At the film's beginning, we learn via a very subtle family interaction that Rama is pregnant, a fact that she keeps from her mother and sisters. This choice to hide her pregnancy becomes a taxing secret that Rama harbors, isolating herself from everyone around her besides, to a certain extent, her partner. But even this exception has its limitations. For much of the movie, Rama excludes her partner from the depth of the emotional stir she is experiencing; denying him access to enter again and again. Once the trial starts, the audience is ushered into her inner world—slightly, slowly—as Laurence’s weighty and vulnerable admissions engender Rama to contemplate her upbringing and her complex relationship with her mother. Away from home, in the privacy of strangers and solitude, we watch Rama’s well-constructed detachment decay until, finally: the darkness, the fragility, the pain, childlike and familiar, all spring to the surface.
Like Laurence, Rama has a Senegalese background. But, we are not given any direct details of Rama’s relationship to Senegal. Has she ever visited or lived there? Is she fond of the place? Does she regard it as home? These are questions the audience cannot truly answer. And because of this void of information, her mother—the ultimate link between her and the country of her ancestors—acts as a window into her feelings about her diasporic identity. But, there isn’t much detail provided about Rama’s mother either. Mostly, we are shown Rama’s childhood memories of her at home sitting in restless silence or yelling at her children. Laurence’s trial confessions supply a similar window into Rama’s feelings, but since Laurence grew up in Senegal and Rama came of age in France, an inherent difference exists between their relationships with these countries, and therefore their identities. Rama is of course African, but she is French as well. She has the accent, the citizenship, the nuanced understanding of French life; all things that Laurence is just getting a grasp on. Though they are both oppressed by the same boot, they experience varying levels of strain. This difference in their struggles is most emphasized by our introduction to them. When the audience first meets Rama, she is at the front of a lecture hall teaching a room full of university students. When we meet Laurence, who came to France to pursue philosophy, she is handcuffed. Their contrasts illustrate the lines between them: their intersections and commonalities, their distinctions, and what they might mean to each other. For Rama, Laurence and her court case provide a portrait of someone similar to Rama’s mother: a lonesome African woman dredging through the colonizer’s society, trying to make a life for herself amidst racism and financial instability. Through Laurence’s story, Rama can fill in the blanks for herself about her past and her mother. But for Laurence, Rama is a spectator, a woman who looks like her and empathizes with her, but ultimately sits, recorder in hand, at a distance.
Before making Saint Omer, Alice Diop’s filmography was already stacked with a number of documentaries, including the award-winning 2016 film, Nous (or We for English speakers). In Nous, Diop documents people from immigrant communities in the Parisian suburbs. Each shot peeks into the lives of very ordinary people, weaving together their stories, and, in Diop’s own words, “complet[ing] a missing part of French history.” This aim to depict unrepresented lives saturates Diop’s work, especially Saint Omer. “For me, Saint Omer is a continuation of the questions which have propelled me since I began working in cinema, and it’s almost a development or an outgrowth of the questions I held onto in Nous. […] I became a filmmaker due to a lack of representation, a resolve to interrogate the ways that we see or do not see the black body.”
During the mid-2000s through the 2010s, it was impossible to escape the discourse around representation in the media. These conversations dominated magazine columns and social threads everywhere, calling for a media landscape that reflected the diversity of its viewership. And, generally speaking, this push led to positive results. Now, if you scroll through HBO or Hulu or any other streaming service, you’ll see an abundance of shows and films about people of and from different identities and communities—black, brown, Asian, Latinx, queer, disabled, rich, working-class, etc, etc. Name a group, and you’ll likely find stories about them. Yet, up until very recently, many of these stories resorted to what book critic Parul Seghal calls the trauma plot—a literary and cinematic motif that “reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.” This trope can especially be seen in portrayals about black people who have historically endured innumerable systemic traumas, traumas that are, of course, part of black people’s intimate histories. But this is not the only story and the trauma plot is not the only way to tell it, even if the nature of the narrative is indeed heartbreaking. Recent shows and films like I May Destroy You, Small Axe, Atlanta, and Moonlight, just to name a few, teach us this. By employing nuance, surprise, and, in some cases, humor these cinematic pieces move past the predictable and shallow toward a more crystalline image of black life. With Saint Omer, Alice Diop does exactly the same, putting a light to the essence of being black, being immigrant, being woman—a loaded trifecta—and coloring in history with the details of that essence, complicated as it may be.
One of my favorite scenes, an old memory of Rama’s, happens towards the end of the movie. Rama’s mother is sitting in front of a mirror, adorning herself with beautiful gold jewelry. As she does so, a somberness takes over her face and she begins to cry. The camera then turns and shows a young Rama watching from the doorway. Soon, she comes closer and joins her mother in front of the mirror. Together, they gaze. Rama’s mother looks at herself and Rama looks at her mother. It is the most intimate encounter we’ve seen of the two and though it is mostly silent, save the sounds of body movement and air, the scene says so much. An immigrant woman disenchanted with the harsh reality of living in a foreign country and raising children alone grasps for a semblance of solace by trying to dress up her sorrow. But even she knows this pain is too big for a facade. Her child, whom she constantly berates and pushes away, sees this despair. She wants to understand, to see it clearly. She looks in the mirror at her mother, at herself. She wants to understand. She is trying so hard. The next time we see the two of them together is at the film’s finale. It is the present day and a very pregnant Rama is showing. She is sitting in her mother’s living room, holding her hand, when her mother—breath audible, eyes barely open—says, “I’m so tired.”
The second time I saw this film I was at my own mother’s house. We were looking for something to watch and I suggested Saint Omer. My mom, a Nigerian immigrant, usually favors romcoms and Nollywood movies over slow dramas, but I turned this on, mentioning how good it was. What I did not mention was my quiet desire for the film to speak to her. I hoped it might articulate things I’ve been wanting to tell her for years. I wanted her to see the things that I couldn’t say. Watching the film together felt so laden with meaning I could barely stand it. After thirty minutes, I finally turned to look at her. This was her day off after a week of back-to-back 12-hour shifts. Of course, she had fallen asleep. She must have been tired.