![]() ![]() She’s comforted by her partner, a white man named Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery), a musician. ![]() What’s more, that power, which is the engine of Diop’s mightily inventive cinematic craft, turns out to be a dangerous one, setting Rama’s (and, implicitly, Diop’s) creative drive, her artistic sensibility, into conflict with her sense of justice and, for that matter, with her sense of self.ĭiop starts the film with a shot of a Black woman carrying a baby, in what appears to be a nightmare from which Rama awakens, calling for her mother. On the basis of the narrow premise of this trial, Diop creates a wide-ranging and probing drama, along with something of a meta-drama, to explore such critical matters as the nature of personal and national identity, the multigenerational traumas of migration, France’s ongoing political and cultural failures to reflect its ethnic and racial diversity, and, centrally, the very power of language to create images and to embody realities. Like Rama, Diop was born in France to a Senegalese family like Laurence, Kabou was born and raised in Senegal and came to France to attend university. The film’s two main characters, and their real-life cognates, are Black women. Diop based the movie on the real-life case of Fabienne Kabou, who was tried, in 2016, in the northern French town of the title, for killing her own baby-and Diop in fact attended that trial. The movie’s protagonist isn’t Laurence but, rather, a thirtysomething writer and professor named Rama (Kayije Kagame), who attends the trial in order to write a book about Laurence, and whose point of view as an observer is the one through which the details of the trial are conveyed. “Saint Omer,” which goes into wide release Friday, is both a docudrama and an implicit metafiction, placing the filmmaker’s surrogate in the onscreen action. ![]() ![]() This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity. Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. The person who describes the event is Laurence Coly (played by Guslagie Malanda), who is accused of killing her baby in this manner, and whose detailed confession of her crime occurs in the courtroom, in the course of her trial. I’d have sworn that I saw this in the French director Alice Diop’s film “Saint Omer,” yet I’d also swear that I didn’t-because, although no such scene is included in the movie, it’s described so vividly in the course of the action that I felt as if it was shown onscreen. On a long and deep beach at night, with little but moonlight shimmering vaguely on the waves, a woman gently but unhesitatingly deposits a baby in the sand, near the rising tide, and walks away. ![]()
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