Old Yorker

  • Blue Jean

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Georgia Oakley (2022)

    North-East England, 1988.  As twenty-something Jean (Rosy McEwen) drives to the secondary school where she’s a PE and games teacher, the BBC Today programme news story on her car radio is the Thatcher government’s upcoming ‘Section 28’ legislation to prohibit the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.  Jean turns off the radio but can’t do much about a Tory poster on the billboard she drives past each working day – a poster urging ‘traditional values’ and ‘keep politics out of education’ (which brings pots and kettles to mind).  Before she goes out on a Saturday evening, Jean watches Blind Date – reviled as anti-gay propaganda by Viv (Kerrie Hayes), Jean’s lover.  The two spend the rest of the evening at their usual bar with friends Ace (Stacy Abalogun) and Debbie (Amy Booth-Steel), who, like Viv, are forthrightly lesbian.  Jean gets on well with them but seems at a remove from the group, in how she looks and what she says.  At school, she keeps her sexual orientation a secret, her private life just that.  As she walks through the changing rooms after a games lesson, a couple of undressed girls giggle, ‘Hey, get lost, dyke’, but without seeming to mean it.  When other teachers invite Jean out for a Friday night drink, she always makes her excuses.  The school is some way from her home and social network.  Jean doesn’t mind the lengthy commute:  it’s reassuring proof of the distance between her two worlds.

    It’s no surprise that the storyline of Blue Jean turns the title character’s carefully compartmentalised life upside down.  Her partnership with Viv founders, thanks to Jean’s in-and-out-of-the-closet tendencies and to how, in particular, these play out in relation to a new pupil at Jean’s school.  But this predictability doesn’t stop writer-director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature from being a good film, with two major strengths.  The first is Rosy McEwen who, from the start, embodies Jean’s vigilant unease subtly but incisively.  Although she deals in a teacher’s usual way with pupils whispering in class, McEwen shows in her face, in a split second, Jean’s nervousness that they may be whispering about her.  Blue Jean’s other chief virtue is that Georgia Oakley, while making clear the corrosive consequences of Jean’s failure to embrace her sexuality, nevertheless takes her anxieties seriously.  As the title implies, Jean’s blue because she’s living a lie but the narrative does justice to the challenge of her telling the truth.  Born in the year in which her story is set, Oakley is generous and imaginative enough to show sympathy for the protagonist’s predicament beyond simply making the point that Clause 28 encouraged people like Jean to deny their sexual identity.  And Oakley recreates this bygone age with some nice period details.  Jean makes a living in physical education but she’s a heavy smoker.  At home she plays a tape that teaches its listeners to relax – to highly counterproductive effect when the tape gets snarled up in Jean’s cassette player.

    The new pupil and plot catalyst is sixteen-year-old Lois (Lucy Halliday), a Scottish girl who lives on the wrong side of the tracks.  One Saturday night, she turns up at the bar frequented by Jean, Viv et al.  Jean and Lois exchange looks but no words about this, either in the bar or at school next week.  Lois joins the netball team that Jean coaches, where her aptitude and attitude instantly put her at loggerheads with Siobhan (Lydia Page), hitherto the team’s star player.  When Lois next comes to the gay bar, there is a confrontation with Jean, who anxiously warns her off.  The confrontation takes place in the bar toilets:  Viv sees Jean and Lois emerging from them and draws the wrong conclusion.  Jean explains who Lois is; Viv is furiously unimpressed by Jean’s fearful reaction to being spotted in queer company.  At school, rising tensions between Siobhan and Lois culminate in a post-netball-practice fight, which Jean breaks up, followed by an incident in the showers, part of which Jean happens to witness.  Siobhan provokes the fight by taunting Lois as a virgin and a lesbian.  In the showers, she seduces Lois and they’re kissing hungrily when Jean walks past.  At this point, Siobhan breaks away, screaming claims that Lois has assaulted her.  The girls are called in by Paula (Lainey Shaw), Jean’s immediate boss and prejudiced in Siobhan’s favour, to give their accounts of what happened.  Jean doesn’t contradict Siobhan’s version of events and Lois is suspended from school.

    Georgia Oakley validates what seem like plotting contrivances by rooting them in character or returning to them fruitfully.  Jean makes a mess of things vis-à-vis Lois at nearly every turn:  how so, when Jean is such a cautious self-protector?   Because she hasn’t factored in this kind of unexpected intervention – Lois is too young to be in the bar, which isn’t near the school.  So Jean is unprecedentedly panicked:  Section 28 headlines and undaunted Viv’s demands increase the panic.   In an early scene, Sasha (Aoife Kennan), Jean’s sister, calls unexpectedly at her flat:  Sasha’s mother-in-law has been rushed into hospital and urgently needs a babysitter for her five-year-old son, Sam.  When the doorbell rings, Jean and Viv are making love; once Sasha has gone, leaving Sam with Jean, Viv reappears and the little boy demands to know who she is; Jean’s reply – ‘my friend’ – seems reasonable but Viv leaves in a huff.  For a while, this bit seems nothing more than an awkward way of introducing the fault line in Jean and Viv’s relationship but its meanings are transformed by a later scene, when Jean goes for lunch at the home of Sasha and her dreary husband, Tim (Scott Turnbull).  A well-written conversation between the sisters, while Tim’s out of the room, reveals that Sam told Sasha about Viv.  And more:  Jean’s annoyed to see that the family photos on Sasha’s mantelpiece still include one of Jean’s own wedding day – she has asked Sasha before to take it down.  Sasha refuses:  she doesn’t ‘think it’s right that you want to erase part of your life – that you expect us to’.  She takes Jean to task for not telling her, before she dropped Sam off that night, that ‘you had a woman there’.

    There are some clumsy things in the film, to be sure.  The Blind Date clips make their point about hetero-normative media monopoly in the 1980s but one would have been enough:  it’s hard to believe that Jean, who has tried and abandoned straight romance, keeps watching the show, even in a spirit of masochism.  An excerpt from a BBC TV news bulletin about women ‘commandos’ abseiling into the House of Lords to protest the Clause 28 legislation is worth including but how come the (surprisingly numerous) PE teachers at Jean’s school are all gathered round a staffroom television to watch?   Oakley then makes things worse by parcelling out crudely obvious reactions to the news from the older teachers:  Paula commends the legislation (‘Young people have such vulnerable minds’); Dave (Deka Walmsley) jokes about the protesters’ appearance (‘Wouldn’t wanna run into them women in a dark alley – they’d ‘ave ya guts for garters, they would’).  At Sam’s birthday party, Jean gets trapped in a gruesome conversation with Tim’s ex-colleague, Craig (Edmund Wiseman):  when he eventually asks, ‘Got a man on the scene at the moment then have you, Jean?’ she finds herself replying, ‘No, I haven’t … I’m a lesbian’.  It’s ironically effective that she comes clean at a public gathering as a desperate means of escaping it but the follow-up sequence is one cliché after another.  Jean sits in Sasha and Tim’s garden with just her cigarette for company.  She has a laughing-crying jag then an epiphany as she sees horses in the distance, cantering free.  (This was made worse watching Blue Jean at BFI where the current Lloyds Bank commercial is always played these days between the trailers and the main film.)

    Yet more of Blue Jean works well – and Oakley brings off some difficult things, including the nice distinction between Jean’s ‘non-promotion’ and concealment of her sexuality.  The damaging consequences of her discretion, especially her failure to contradict Siobhan’s lie, register strongly but not melodramatically.  Even in the film’s relatively upbeat climax, Oakley avoids the easy option of simply dissolving Jean’s ambivalence.  Trying to make amends to Lois, Jean persuades her to come along to a birthday party for Debbie.  The party is subsidised by a ‘bog fund’:  Ace explains to Lois that ‘any poor lesbians in the North East’ can apply for support to this fund, which depends considerably on the likes of Jean – ‘lesbians with “proper” jobs’.  Viv’s at the party; she and Jean exchange friendly words but there’s no suggestion they’ll get back together.  This time, when Jean leaves the room where the party’s happening and has a solitary smoke on a balcony outside, she’s calmly reflective (and there’s not a black horse to be seen in the urban nightscape she looks out on).  Next morning, when she drives to work, the Tory poster is still in evidence but Jean arrives at school with a smile on her face.  That uncharacteristic smile is seriously premature – Clause 28 was eventually repealed in 2003 – and may even be willed.  But it’s good to see.

    10 February 2023

  • Saint Omer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alice Diop (2022)

    In 1961 Sylvia Plath visited the commune of Berck-sur-Mer in the French département of Pas-de-Calais.  The following year, in her seven-part poem ‘Berck-Plage’, she fused memories of the place, especially of maimed war veterans in the local military hospital, with more recent impressions of the death of Percy Key, Plath’s neighbour in Devon.  Not too long after getting to know ‘Berck-Plage’, I learned from reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that Jean-Dominique Bauby was treated in his last years, and died, at another hospital in the commune.  I mentioned the coincidence to Patrick, a work colleague and friend.  He drily observed that Berck-Plage was ‘clearly a beach to avoid’.  Twenty-odd years later along comes Alice Diop’s Saint Omer.  Diop is an experienced, admired maker of documentaries (none of which I’ve seen) and Saint Omer, her first dramatic feature, is based on real events.  (Diop wrote the screenplay with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye.)   In 2016, Fabienne Kabou stood trial for the murder of her fifteen-month-old daughter, Adélaïde, whom she left to drown on a beach – no prizes for guessing which beach.  According to a Guardian report on the trial, Kabou, when arrested, told police that she chose Berck as the place to end her child’s life ‘because even the name sounded sad’.  Fabienne Kabou has now become Laurence Coly but the infanticide’s location is unchanged and Diop’s film is bleak even beyond the dictates of the central story.  I long ago lost touch with Patrick but he’d be amused to know that Saint Omer vindicates his sarcasm.

    Although Laurence (Guslagie Malanda) is the film’s key figure, she occupies less screen time than Rama (Kayije Kagame), an academic and a successful novelist, who travels from Paris, where she lives and works, to the Pas-de-Calais sub-prefecture of Saint-Omer [sic][1] to attend Laurence’s trial for the killing of her daughter, Elise.  Except for a brief flashback to the night of the crime, Laurence is seen only in the courtroom.  Rama, who intends to write about the trial, appears in places other than the public gallery:  at home with her partner, Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery); at a family gathering; lecturing to students; alone in her Saint-Omer hotel room or lunching in the town with Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), Laurence’s mother; and in occasional glimpses of her girlhood.  Rama’s words, moods and behaviour in these various contexts, in conjunction with Laurence’s evidence in court, gradually reveal how much the two have in common.  Laurence was born and raised in Senegal; Rama is of Senegalese heritage.  Both have had difficult relationships with their mother.  Laurence’s repeatedly self-contradictory statements include blaming her crime on sorcery but she, like Rama, is highly educated.  In the course of her evidence, she name-checks philosophers and declares herself ‘a Cartesian’, although a former tutor (Charlotte Clamans) expresses patronising surprise to the court that Laurence chose to write a thesis on Wittgenstein rather than someone closer to her own cultural roots.  Laurence was in a relationship with a much older white man, Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), who fathered the ill-fated Elise.  Rama is pregnant by Adrien, also white and older than she is.

    Physically and visually, however, Laurence and Rama are contrasted.  Laurence moves heavily to the dock; once she takes her place there, she’s necessarily stationary and shown only from the waist up (at most).  Outside the courtroom, Rama is a rangy, somewhat restless figure.  Guslagie Malanda wears her hair tied back; Kayije Kagame wears hers in braids.  Laurence answers the questions of the judge (Valérie Dréville), the prosecuting barrister (Robert Canterella) and her own defence counsel, Mme Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), in what is usually a weary monotone.  Yet Malanda’s voice and immobility are expressive:  they suggest that Laurence, knowing how she’ll be judged, is resigned to her fate.  Her cinnamon-coloured blouses blend with her skin tones, as well as with the wood of the dock and the wall behind it.  DP Claire Mathon’s deft colour co-ordination seems to make Laurence part of and trapped in her immediate surroundings.

    Kayije Kagame also magnetises the camera but does so through her beauty rather than her acting, which is pretty minimal.  For this viewer, that was a persisting problem with Saint Omer.  Alice Diop presents Laurence largely in terms of the effect she has on Rama, both as a socio-culturally engaged writer and as a prospective mother.  A phone conversation with her publisher informs us that ‘Medea Castaway’ is the currently working title for the book Rama’s planning to write and Diop shows her watching Maria Callas in a clip from Pasolini’s Medea (1969).  We can see that Rama, a professor of literature, might want to explore Laurence’s connections to, and differences from, world literature’s best-known infanticide.  Despite their similarities, we can’t see why Rama, given her career achievements and economic status, identifies with the woman on trial.  Indeed, when Rama tells Adrien she’s scared of ‘turning into her’, she appears to be referring not to Laurence but to her own mother (Adama Diallo Tamba) – though I didn’t understand why Rama feared that destiny either.

    Kagame’s Rama is little more than a few shades of unhappy (worried, dismayed, displeased) but this could be what Alice Diop wanted.  She has explained in interviews about her film that she attended Fabienne Kabou’s trial and found herself increasingly troubled by, and obsessed with, the case.  Diop may well expect her audience to know of this personal connection (I don’t think Saint Omer is dramatically self-sufficient unless you do know) – and intend that Rama, as her alter ego, shouldn’t come to life as an independent character but should serve, rather, as a visually striking bridge between what’s happening on screen and the woman behind the camera.  In that case, though, it’s hard to understand why Diop includes the flashbacks to Rama’s girlhood (in which she’s played as a young and an older child by Binta Thiam and Coumba-Mar Thiam respectively, and her mother is played by Seyna Kane).  These flashbacks include not only video recording of a family Christmas but also an insert that isn’t home-movie footage, in which the mother perfunctorily takes milk from the fridge and Nesquik from a kitchen cupboard, the daughter then gets on with her breakfast, and not a word is exchanged between them.  It’s an unenlightening sequence and an awkward fit in the narrative.

    Saint Omer is an unusual courtroom drama, to put it mildly.  Laurence doesn’t deny responsibility for causing Elise’s death.  Asked why she left the infant to die, she says she doesn’t know but that ‘I hope this trial will give me the answer’.   The strategy for her defence isn’t evident from Mme Vaudenay’s cross-examination of successive witnesses; we’re prepared for the barrister’s remarkable closing address only because the actress playing her always looks to be straining at the leash to deliver a big number.  When the opportunity finally arrives, Vaudenay describes the ineluctable bond between mothers and their babies by reference to ‘chimeric cells’:  thanks to these, just as the mother’s genes are transmitted to the child in the womb, so cells from the foetus become part of the mother’s DNA.   Vaudenay goes on to declare that all women (sic) are ‘terribly human monsters … We women, we are all chimeras. We carry within us the traces of our mothers and our daughters in a never-ending chain’.  In a less purple but more persuasive passage, she maintains that Laurence is mentally ill and that medical treatment would be more appropriate than a prison sentence.  It’s during the meaning-of-motherhood rhetoric that Diop chooses to pan across the faces – most of them female, many of them tearful (Rama’s among these) – in the public gallery.  But the power of the film’s climax comes in the uncharacteristic sobs of the woman in the dock.  This sudden undamming of emotion brings sorcery back to mind:  Laurence seems exorcised – to put it less fancifully, Guslagie Malanda conveys the woman’s relief at being explained.  Perhaps the trial really has given Laurence (if not viewers of the film she’s in) the answer to why she killed.

    Until that defence peroration, Saint Omer is devoid of traditional courtroom histrionics but not of good acting.  The few men in the film are an unappealing lot, from aging rocker Adrien to the bluntly scornful prosecuting barrister, but Xavier Maly’s Dumontet, who tries the patience and impartiality even of the trial judge, is a fine study in craven self-justification.  Salimata Kamate hadn’t acted before:  as Laurence’s mother, she livens things up, both in court and, especially, in the lunch scene with Rama.  In a final flouting of legal-drama convention, Diop doesn’t mention the trial’s outcome in terms of verdict or sentence.  She may think it unnecessary to do so because Fabienne Kabou was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison (reduced to fifteen on appeal).  More likely, Diop is stressing that Laurence is bound to be a victim of injustice – that, regardless of Mme Vaudenay’s eleventh-hour efforts, an offender such as this can’t be properly understood or dealt with by a court of law.

    Saint Omer is absorbing but doubly exasperating.  First, Alice Diop is careful to ensure that Laurence Coly is opaque – and not just in what appears on screen:  in a lengthy interview between Diop and Claire Denis in the latest Sight & Sound (March 2023), both women insist, for example, that the film is ‘not about Black women’.  Second, Rama is presented as just as much a victim as Laurence (not to mention Elise …).  Rama surely has more reasons to be cheerful than Laurence but Kayije Kagame’s face says otherwise and Diop endorses her miserable outlook through her choice of closing song and singer for the soundtrack.  It’s Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Little Girl Blue’, performed by Nina Simone.

    9 February 2023

    [1] I’m not sure why the hyphen has been removed from the actual place name for the film’s title.  The same happened with Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) but there were three hyphens to shed in that case.

Posts navigation