It is a straightforward fact that Saint Omer is a courtroom drama, an account of a murder trial in the northern French town of the title. But gavel-banging clichés are scoured away in Alice Diop’s subtly groundbreaking film. The case would not support them anyway. The accused has already confessed to the charge whose circumstances are now to be established before sentencing. The defendant is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a highly educated woman originally from Senegal, resident in France. Her crime is killing her own daughter, a 15-month-old left to be taken by the tide on a beach near Calais.
Reality shapes the film, a dramatisation of the actual trial of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2013 abandoned her child Ada to die on the same beach. But Saint Omer is of a different order to the usual vague pre-credits assurance “Based on a true story”. Until now, Diop has been a documentary maker. Most of what we hear comes verbatim from court records.
And yet under that seemingly simple act of reconstruction, the film is more complex — more layered — still. While pregnant, Diop attended Kabou’s trial, overwhelmed by a strange sense of connection. Here, she has an avatar in Rama (Kayije Kagame), a French academic born to Senegalese parents: pregnant too, and also obsessed.
Checking into a functional Saint-Omer hotel, Rama is at once our proxy, and her own representative alone. Overlaps become evident between the two women from childhoods Coly calls “ordinary” (that wilfully meaningless word). What might it mean to see yourself reflected in a case like this?
The critical question — how a mother might murder her own child — remains the core. Diop asks it with deceptive simplicity. A film-maker of purpose, she holds the camera on Malanda for long, unbroken monologues. (The actress is remarkable.) And we listen, not to an alibi, but a context. Race and colonial history are part of it. Still more so, the relationship of mothers and daughters.
But driving it throughout is Diop’s implied insistence that we seek the fullest picture, however nuanced and contradictory. Our questions might just beget more questions, she suggests. But all we can do is keep asking them, and not take clichés for answers.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas from February 3
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