REVIEW: SAINT OMER

The Craft Of A Black Magic Woman In A Breathtaking Courtroom Drama

Documentarian Alice Diop pierces the veil between magic, motherhood, and pervasive systemic issues in France with masterful precision in the extraordinary courtroom drama.

By Kennedy J.L Jopson

When Laurence Coly (actress and art curator Guslagie Malanda) approaches the defendant's stand handcuffed at the wrists, attached to a short leash held by a gendarmerie, she nearly vanishes into the wood paneling of the French courtroom surrounding her. The only defense she provides for committing an act as horrific and taboo as infanticide that prompts the concern of a homogenous White jury is “sorcery”.

To them, she is the darkest manifestation of maternity. A child-murdering monster that must be overcome. But to Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant French-Senegalese academic attending the trial to gather material for her next novel, Laurence is a formidable reflection of her deepest feminine fears and unexpressed feelings. Saint Omer closely examines the nuances of Black motherhood and interrogates the impact complex acts of violence experienced in an anti-Black society (both identifiable and covert) can have on an individual.

Based on a true story, the idea for the film emerged when director Alice Diop attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou: a woman who left her 15-month-old daughter at the seashore to be swallowed by the rising tide. Recognizing similarities between herself and Kabou, both being Franco-Senegalese, and mothers of children with White fathers, Diop felt compelled to tell her story. Drawing from a personal and political connection comes naturally for a documentarian guided by an impressive two decades of filmmaking concerning narratives of immigration, Blackness, gender, class, and colonialism. Her documentary We, follows both public and personal narratives of the African immigrant experience in the suburbs of Paris.

Diop parallels Saint Omer seamlessly with the real-life trial through an evocative script that includes exact transcripts from the real court case to highlight the language of the accused and judgment. Shot in chronological order with masterful lighting, cinematographer Claire Mathon and Diop based the mise-en-scene on historical paintings (La Belle Ferronièreby Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro technique in portraiture, black models painted by Cézanne,  and Grape Wine by Andrew Wyeth) to inscribe the pictoriality of these bodies in the history of cinema. Posing long, statuesque shots that drift between distressing close-up portraits and wide-lens frames of the courtroom’s gallery in which Rama is both distinctive in appearance and enshrouded by her difference. This positions the viewer as a participant in the art of critical examination and makes us aware of our urge to objectify and interrogate.

At the beginning of the film’s court proceedings, the jury is informed that the corpse of Laurence’s infant child was initially mistaken for “a migrant drowned in a shipwreck”  washed up on the sand. Diop weaves a connection of an immigrant woman’s tragedy with motherhood and magic within classic literature through Rama’s character writing a story. One that she initially titles Medea Castaway. Referencing the Greek tragedian Euripedes’ play Medea; a witch-mother who betrayed her country for love and murdered her children to spite her treacherous lover.

Medea and Laurence are uncanny, dramatic representations of women who are cultural and racial outcasts; painted as having a connection to witchcraft. Their power is marked by geographical and social otherness, rooted in the subversion of cultural values. They are connected to a literary tradition of women who are punished, usually by death, for stepping beyond acceptable social norms for women, and in this case, specifically for Black women.

Magical realism takes hold in this narrative to express what is made inconspicuous by some and deeply apparent to “others”. Throughout the trial, sexist, racist, and xenophobic slurs are masked as applicable questions and cast across the courtroom like incantations. Willing Laurence to succumb to the cliche stereotypes impressed upon her. The sorcery she speaks of is a tormenting barrier between herself and her aspirations to exist in the world on her terms. Racism and sexism are manifested as maleficent sorcery in a courtroom that collectively participates in the construction of this magical thinking. In refusing to see Laurence as an individual whose actions are also a product of challenging circumstances.

By claiming to be a victim of sorcery, Laurence utilizes the French council’s prejudice and ignorance to help her case. Embracing their racist assumptions of her cultural identity that view her African roots as primitive. Diop suggests there is an arrogance to Western culture, particularly its justice system and the scientific notion that everything can be explained.

When Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), Laurence’s mother, is asked to speak on her behalf, she attests to “a void made deliberately” within Laurence that she cannot explain, or perhaps does not feel she is safe to speak upon. Yet, Mrs. Diatta states that she has “proof of mystical blockages” that have kept her daughter apart from her. “A curse even” is the only explanation she is willing to accept for Laurence’s failure as well as her own as a mother in search of answers. Here, Diop alludes to the generational trauma felt between mothers and their daughters, distanced by differences, both of their own making and those out of their control as Mrs. Diatta questions “Who they wanted to hurt in this case, Laurence, her father, or me?” Referring to a system that is intent on examining Black bodies,  Black identities, Black communities, and Black cultures only to degrade and dehumanize them.

Whether Laurence truly believes she fell victim to sorcery or not, she’s not imagining the very real acts of violence she experienced from her environment. This dark force is enacted not only by systemic oppression in an anti-Black French society— but also by her partner, whose White male privilege, especially as her elder, makes his concealment of Laurence and emotional abuse all too easy for himself and the court to view passively without accountability— and Laurence’s mother, who under the influence of colonialism imposed Western sensibilities onto her daughter and ostracized her from her native language and culture.  

A system that attempts to convince a young Black woman that she should aspire to align with a prescribed idea of upper-class Whiteness — only to then intimidate her out of the classroom and hide her away in kitchens— derail her academic aspirations and confine her agency to a White man’s second apartment bed — is what positioned Laurence between the devil and the deep blue sea. In the end, Laurence’s complexity and ability to control the narrative challenge these formidable forces determined to condemn her. In this way, she embodies Black magic, both of her own making and the dark nature of humanity she endures and absorbs.

In the context of France and its shameful legacy of colonialism, Black women historically have been and continue to be subjected to more violence and oppression than any other persons. Laurence’s character is not only on trial for infanticide but for resisting the roles an anti-Black society in France imposes upon her. For Malanda, who as a Black actress in France has had to repeatedly reject roles she considered stereotypical (criminals, immigrants, terrorists, etc.) her ability to completely empathize with this character and work in congruence with the transcribed script portrays that “I am her through her own words, telling her own story.” Despite living through the words of Kabou/Laurence, much of Malanda’s sensational performance is felt in moments of silence, where the subtle heaving of her chest, sips of air, and flaring of nostrils convey the passage of emotions and life force moving through Laurence, through Malanada, more profoundly than words could.

 In a Q&A with Malanda, she spoke of working with a Chi master to practice “breath work” as the only training she underwent to embody Laurence’s character. To channel Kabou through Laurence was to be “possessed” by the character in spirit. Malanda explained “she was in my body, my dreams, my nightmares, my life.” For Malanda, “empathy is to be ready to feel inside your body that you can be another.” Saint Omer proposes that we women live within each other on a spiritual and chimeric cellular level.

 Diop further brings awareness to our most innate human instincts for survival through selective sound design, composed by engineer Emmanuel Carlos, focused on breath. Rhythmic inhaling and exhaling are a hypnotic ritual device to transport Rama into the darkest chambers of her memories– an adolescence consumed by deafening silence and the absence of motherly affection. Rama holds onto buried anger and resentment that she recognizes in Laurence. However, she is not afraid of becoming like Laurence, rather, she fears becoming like her own mother and birthing intergenerational pain through her unborn child.

“We women, we are all chimeras. We carry within us, the traces of our mothers and of our daughters, who in turn, will carry ours. It is a never-ending chain. In a way, us women, we are all monsters. But we are terribly human monsters.”

 After a  climactic, closing appeal made by Laurence’s defense attorney straight into the eye of the camera, I left the theater deeply moved and in tears— with an aching in my chest to reach out to my mother, from whom I too have been estranged. This is a film that speaks to all women, but in the specific context of being a Black woman — the stories, lineages of pain, and silence that Black women endure. As an example of a courtroom drama, Saint Omer is subversive. It’s not about the trial nor the verdict. It’s about how our society builds up characters and values them. And how we tear them down. The question we are left with is not “Do we believe in right and wrong?” It’s not "Do we believe in magic?” But do we believe in redemption?

Saint Omer is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. SRAB Films // Canal+ // Picturehouse.

Kennedy J.L. Jopson is a multimedia writer born and raised in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and based in London, UK. She curates contemporary art and writes on the intersection of race and gender in literature, theatre, and film. Kennedy attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, where she studied Culture, Criticism, and Curation.