Saint Omer (2022) France, Directed by Alice Diop
Filmic Postcard | March 2023
There is something profoundly sacred in a face…it is, after all, the eye from which we get a glimpse of the ‘other’ – our approach to someone who is not ‘I’ and who we can only approach, but never truly know. But every face also carries with it a notoriety when gazed upon – because like mirrors, faces are also masks, and they have that ability to project back to you darkness and fears that you have unconsciously summoned up in that very gaze. Your innermost torment or ineffable trials are thus laid bare on another’s face, rather than on your own. After 300,000 years of evolution, the human psyche can do little to resist our primitive consciousness that connects us to all other human beings.
Primitive consciousness emerges first as you awaken from anaesthesia – that moment of delirium before you ‘come around’ to your full faculties and awareness – science has found that human consciousness is “associated with the activations of deep, primitive brain structures rather than the evolutionary younger neocortex”. We are our history; and we are individuals through the way we choose to interpret memories and histories.
In our deep subconscious, chimera is at work.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a multilayering of fact/fiction, ancient/modern – it is a story about a trial that is also a retelling of Medea (and Pasolini’s great film of this myth is referenced in it). But in saying this, I am only describing the narrative arc of the film when it is, in fact, so much more. This is Diop’s first feature; she worked on the script with the film’s editor, Amrita David, who has been her close collaborator since La mort de Danton (2011) days; as well as Marie NDiaye, a well-known playwright and novelist (who is also screenwriter for Claire Denis’ White Material (2009) one that offers French colonisation through a different lens); whom Diop had particularly wanted to work due to certain novelistic qualities in the responses of the accused.
The public trial of Fabienne Kabou (a mother and philosophy student) was held in 2013 in the town of Saint Omer; and Kabou drew the attention of Diop from the outset: both are Franco-Senegalese women; both were highly educated, and in interracial relationships. Kabou is Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda with a stoic intelligence that belies the deed she has been accused of committing – her presence alone is worth the entry ticket to this film). She has been accused of infanticide; having travelled to Berck-sur-Mer with her child Adélaïde, nicknamed ‘Ada’ (in the film, it is Elise nicknamed ‘Lili’) just to let the tidal waves carry her out to sea. The film is largely the trial itself and remains in the courtroom for almost all of its 2 hours and 2 minutes. Told from the point of view of Rama (a subtle performance from Kayije Kagame – incredibly, this is her first feature film) an author and professor of literature who attended the trial (just like Diop did – but here, Rama is a witness rather than as Diop’s stand-in). Rama is pregnant through an interracial relationship (as was Diop at the time) and has had a difficult childhood; especially in her relationship with her mother. This figure of the witness is pivotal, as it allowed Diop the distance between documentary and fiction.
Diop has been making documentaries for the past 17 years but didn’t want to consider this trial for a documentary; and we are lucky, because the film was able to fully explore the political elements that had been present in her other films in a more abstract but charged way: of colonisation, the Black body, gender politics, lineage, histories, memories and motherhood.
The film opens with Rama in a lecture theatre, she was showing a news footage of women who had their heads shaved in the post-war period; before they were paraded in the streets to be humiliated for their collaboration with the Germans. A passage from Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) text was read to accompany it – through her words, we immediately recognise language’s ability to transcend the horrors of what is right in front of you into something more akin to a state of grace. This reading also offers a window in which, as the audience, how we should approach the film. Rama and Coly (and Diop through them) use language to transform experiences of shame and cruelty into a different state – to explore the ethical implications of mourning and memory; the witnessing of traumatic events and our ability to see a different side to this horror.
Rama’s own memories of her childhood; her difficult relationship with her mother – is threaded throughout the film – as though a dream. These sequences are closer to the mythic than memory: the mythic is often unclear but universal, and unlike a fable, its aim is not to teach us a lesson, but more undefinable than that; and yet it has the ability to draw out our subconscious thoughts in our interpreting of it.
In Duras’ text, all is related back to the mother – the absence; of her body – this body of the mother from which we have all emerged, naked, to the world; is already charged with a chimeric quality. What is carried through her body into the next: genetic imprints and emotional memories? Or, even more than that?
Saint Omer is a film suffused with this same kind of emotional and intellectual intensity; further heightened through Diop’s use of pauses; the slowness of the camera and the very long single takes on Coly; as well as the deliberate silences, open up to a salient space of reflection. It gives the audience, as well as the prosecutor, the judge, the accused, and Rama, time to look inwards. There is great dignity shown by Coly on the stand – she is the figure of the mother, noble in her otherness; but also a sorceress who is able to conjure up feelings and thoughts, repressed or hidden, about mothers and daughters in the viewer.
These latent echos are manifested in Coly, through her use of language (as explained by Malanda; that because of “the colonisation by the French in Africa, the French they speak is not everyday French, it’s closer to literature, in a way”); she had the ability to put herself at a distance from her crime. And the coextensive parallels – of Rama and her own mother; Rama and her unborn child; Rama and Coly; Coly and Lili; of Diop and Kabou; Kabou and Ada; mothers; motherhood; daughters; all come to bring about something profound in our watching of this film. Clearly, this film affected Diop enormously; she fainted on set after the filming concluded, “It was as if after three weeks I had given birth to a monster. And the baby monster became a film called ‘Saint Omer.’”
Saint Omer: the locus of the unspeakable.
What is perhaps the most interesting thing about Malanda’s performance – is that she was asked to say her lines as though she was reading a Duras novel; there is something hypnotic and spell-like in her demeanour, in the way words are expressed. The fact that none of this was made up, except the reference to chimera, (a mythic creature composed of parts of other beasts) this was added in by Diop in the closing statement from the defence lawyer. When the real lawyer for Kabou was shown the film by Diop – after watching it, she immediately said to her – why hadn’t she thought of chimera at the time?! This comment was a true gift to Diop.
For Diop, she wanted to create in the film the same kind of texture and quality of intensity that was felt in the courtroom; and I might add, she was extremely successful in her pursuit. I also especially loved the performance of Valérie Dréville as the judge or La Présidente du tribunal. Dréville is a well-known theatre actor and associated artist for the Avignon Festival and the National Theater of Strasbourg; and her theatre-craft shines through; her command of the screen is electric; present and authentic. As is the use of voice, breath, and music that is the glorious soundscape of Saint Omer; ending the film with Nina Simone’s sultry reprise of Little Girl Blue (2013 remastered version).
There is a brilliant, and insightful interview of Diop at the NYFF60 held at the Lincoln Center where she talks about how this film came to be, as well as the political reading of Blackness and the Black woman in this film; also her take on Durasian language. Nicholas Elliott, the New York correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma is her translator – and one of the best live translations I’ve come across at these festivals (his searing intellect really helped get her points across to the audience). Diop’s film richly deserves the many awards it has won: Prix Jean Vigo, the Grand Prix winner at the Venice film festival, César for Meilleur premier film amongst others.
To end, we need to return to the beginning, as it’s impossible to ignore the significance found in the film’s title, Saint Omer, in French, Omer sounds like O mere — Oh mother — the mother saint, mother as saint, or saintly mother; and also O merde in an imperfect rhyme; and as unfathomable as the sea (mer) when taken literally…Perhaps it is only fitting to cite the closing remarks of the defence lawyer: “We are all chimeras…We carry the genetic and emotional traces of our mothers and our daughters — as will our daughters after us.”
The Alliance Française French Film Festival is currently on in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth from now until 5th April; and in other states until the 23rd April.
Night 