Saint Omer

Cut-away reac­tion shots in cin­e­ma are employed as a crutch – a way for a direc­tor to keep an audi­ence locked into a con­trived emo­tion­al wave pat­tern. For the most part, they tend to be evil, a short­cut to manip­u­la­tion and crass sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. In her fic­tion fea­ture debut, Saint Omer, French film­mak­er Alice Diop ele­vates the hum­ble reac­tion shot to the lev­el of high art, draw­ing on a gallery of gaunt faces who are com­plete­ly lost as to how they should react to what they’re see­ing and hearing.

The intense con­fu­sion, the fiery incom­pre­hen­sion, the sad­ness that man­i­fests beyond rea­son all serve to enhance the already-crush­ing cen­tral dra­ma in which a fall­en woman stands in the dock of a provin­cial French court­room and attempts to engi­neer a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for unspeak­able crimes.

Lau­rence Coly (Gus­lagie Malan­ga), clad in a sim­ple brown cardi­gan, stands accused of leav­ing her 15-month-old daugh­ter on a beach at night dur­ing high tide, and the func­tion of this court hear­ing is to deter­mine why she would com­mit such an act. Watch­ing intent­ly and dis­traught­ly with her note­book is Rama (Kay­i­je Kagame), a Parisian aca­d­e­m­ic whose stud­ies err towards depic­tions of female trau­ma and vio­lence such as ​‘Medea’ and the works of author and film­mak­er Mar­guerite Duras.

Although it’s nev­er direct­ly stat­ed, and Diop is not too insis­tent in mak­ing (or, at least, agree­ing with) these con­nec­tions, Rama clear­ly heads along to the trail see­ing Coly as a real-life exam­ple of a trag­ic lit­er­ary hero­ine. The real­i­ty – and it’s a real­i­ty that makes this film so extra­or­di­nary – is far more complex.

Coly’s tes­ti­mo­ny paints a pic­ture of a trou­bled woman, an intel­lec­tu­al (pos­si­bly pseu­do), versed in phi­los­o­phy, who admits to hav­ing made a num­ber of ques­tion­able deci­sions in her life on the pre­cip­i­tous path to hap­pi­ness. The judge (Valérie Dréville) fires ques­tions at her in order to amply flesh out this por­trait, and as Coly talks, lit­tle con­tra­dic­tions and incon­sis­ten­cies begin to mount.

Malan­ga is, for the major­i­ty of the film, com­plete­ly stone-faced, even when she describes in har­row­ing detail the days, hours and min­utes lead­ing up to the moment which has land­ed her in prison, pos­si­bly for the remain­der of her life. It’s a remark­able anti-per­for­mance where words and lan­guage are all-but stripped of exter­nal emo­tion and left to become their own con­found­ing mode of expres­sion. Is this Coly’s cal­cu­lat­ed modus operan­di? Or has this expe­ri­ence trans­formed her into this pas­sive husk who per­haps sees this crime as the nat­ur­al out­come of the col­lect­ed trau­mas from which she suffered?

With Saint Omer, Diop not only refresh­es and expands upon the tired con­ven­tions of the court­room dra­ma, but she real­ly drills down into the fun­da­men­tal gaps in our under­stand­ing of human nature and the tan­ta­lis­ing but illu­sive ​‘why?’ of it all. Coly is not a case study. She is an enig­ma of the Charles Fos­ter Kane vari­ety, and Diop’s coup to grace is to inform us that, in this instance, there was no Rose­bud. There rarely is.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.