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.
