"Saint Omer" -- Movie Review

 

On the opening weekend of the official release of courtroom drama “Saint Omer”, I attended a special screening at Lincoln Center.

Synopsis

When a young woman goes on trial for killing her baby, will she be found guilty or is she merely being set up to take the fall?

Story

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a successful author who has commenced to proceed on her next book:  a work about the mythical character Medea and how she overcame the patriarchy.  As part of her research for that tome, she leaves her family and her husband in Paris for a short trip to Saint Omer, a town in northern France.  While there, she will spend several days attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese philosophy student in her mid-twenties, who is accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter Ellise.  This turns out to be a trial that is captivating much of the nation, receiving extensive coverage by the news media.

During the trial, it comes out that Coly admits to the killing of her baby – however, she claims that it was not her fault.  She believes that sorcery was involved – specifically, she thinks that a curse was put on her by someone and it was this that caused her infant’s death.  In tracing her background, it turns out that the father of her baby is Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), a much older married man with whom she was engaging in an affair.  Dumontet was supporting her financially when Coly’s father stopped financing her studies in France.  With the presence of the unwanted baby, their relationship became even more strained.

As the trial wears on, it becomes evident that Rama is having a severe emotional reaction the more she listens to Coly; upon hearing about Coly’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother, Rama compares this to her own family situation and can easily relate.  Rama instantly becomes sympathetic to Coly’s situation.  But there’s much more to it than merely that.  It seems that Rama herself is several months pregnant; listening to Coly’s history, she begins to wonder if she would have a similar reaction to her own baby – or if she should even have the baby at all.  Given the similarities, will Rama decide to take her pregnancy to term? 

Review

“Saint Omer” has been one of those films that could be characterized as a darling of the critics; not only has it appeared at a number of film festivals in the past year, it has also either won or been nominated for quite a few awards.  All of that having been said, it lacks an emotional impact, keeping the characters at an arm’s length (or more), never truly humanizing them sufficiently for the audience to gain an interest in their outcome.  Although the story is about Coly’s trial, it is the character of Rama that appears to be the real protagonist here and she comes across as so distant and detached that one is left to merely shrug at the conclusion. 

Much of the movie has the static nature of a stage play because the majority takes place in the courtroom during the trial.  The reason why Rama feels so strongly about attending the trial remains somewhat vague for a good deal of the story; by the time her true motivation is revealed, it seems too little too late.  Some of this may be due to the director’s previous experience as a documentarian and “Saint Omer” is her first feature film narrative.  It is possible that the film’s impact may vary based on gender – that is to say women may find this motion picture of a more compelling nature than men.  The fact that Rama sees tying this into the mythic tale of Medea only serves to buttress this theory.   

Director Alice Diop and actress Guslagie Malanda (Laurence Coly) were interviewed following the screening.  Diop said that this is based on a real trial, which she and many other women in France followed rather closely because it spoke to maternity and motherhood.  She said that the reason why she did not make this as a documentary was because that by the time she decided she wanted to turn this into a film the trial was already over.  Malanda said that originally, there were 10 rehearsals scheduled but they wound up only needing two because they found both the story and the character to be rather straightforward.  She added that she prepared for the shoot for months in the same way that an athlete would leading up to a competition.