With her first (semi-) fictional feature, Alice Diop employs her famous documentary style to show us the reality of our interior and exterior selves, providing a vivid case study in why and how women should speak up about inequality.
★★★★★
The very fact that this is documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s (La permanence, Nous) first fictional film feels like a redundant statement as the director uses the new, potentially more liberated space of fiction only to hone her style. We move through the story by way of the actions and reactions of its characters, whose unflinchingly objective framing forces us to stare, mull over the muscles in their faces and find the meaning that they cannot help but reveal to us. It is through this phenomenal style that Diop illustrates the dark line between interiority and exteriority that women must draw to survive, but how this must often be gerrymandered lest their humanity is forgotten—an offence that both Diop and her audience know is committed all too often.
Even so, Saint Omer is not completely fictional. Based on the real-life 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, which Diop attended, the film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame) as she witnesses the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman accused of killing her baby daughter, and seeks inspiration for a modern-day retelling of Euripides’ Medea. As the long-winded procedure drags on, Diop refrains from using the powers of film to separate us from the trial’s temporality, forcibly maintaining our attention on characters as they give their testimonies so that nothing that is written on their faces goes unread.
It is no wonder, given how entrenched Saint Omer is in reality, that the presentation of the characters is very much reflective of how we see and interact with people in real life. Not only do we continually switch protagonists, with long periods of time focusing on Rama, and long periods focusing on Laurence, but the characters have their own agency as humans. We don’t see any more of Laurence’s life than Rama sees, and conversely, even when we are with Rama, she doesn’t say a whole lot (because when you are by yourself, why would you?). In this way, Diop is presenting a slice-of-life naturalism that forces the audience to see the two woman the same way they would anybody in real life—solely the exterior, with interiority left up to interpretation.
This is arguably a remnant of Diop’s documentary style, positioning the audience in the room with only as much knowledge as the characters on screen. One could relate this to the film’s theme of comparing law to humanity, particularly surrounding who is to blame in the case (Coly is a murderer, but was her normal life not equally killed by the birth of her daughter and the lack of help she got in the process?). This relates to the inspiration Diop draws from the play Medea, in which the eponymous princess kills her two sons out of despair following her maltreatment by her husband Jason. In the play, her circumstances are laid out bare at the very start by Nurse, thus the justification for the killing at the climax evolves from the very start. By contrast, Diop took the more realist—however no more dramatic—approach of allowing Laurence’s maltreatment to come to light gradually as the case unfolds. All biases and judgements made about the quietly distraught Laurence are put to rest slowly, showing us not only the incompatibility of the objective legal system with such deep emotional traumas, but also how the truth of women’s stories is often shrouded by societal presuppositions. This is the sheer power of Diop’s objective filmmaking, mimicking our poor judgement of people, fooling us into thinking this piece of fiction was somewhat separated from our morality when we were actually a part of it all along.
This of course could not be possible without amazing performances by both Kagame and Malanda. Both women portray their characters with such depth that it’s hard not to believe that Malanda, for example, has been through such a traumatic experience. There are also brilliant supporting performances from Xavier Many—who plays Luc Dumontet, the Jason to Malanda’s Medea—and Valérie Dréville, the voice of painfully logical reason as the judge. Diop’s filmmaking, again stemming from its documentary roots, relies heavily on the actors; they are the sole way by which the story is told. The brilliance of Saint Omer comes from the collaboration between Diop’s mastery and a staggeringly effective ensemble.
And yet, after all is done, the case left unclosed, Diop resolves to showing us an empty courtroom, the judge’s chair, the defendant’s chair, all empty. It’s almost as if who was sat in them doesn’t matter, because the problems that Saint Omer addresses are universal, and could happen to anyone. All we are left with is a poignant, fourth-wall breaking monologue by the defending counsellor, bringing scientific fact to the idea of motherhood that rounds off Diop’s message perfectly. After we cut to black from a close-up of Rama, all we are left with is the sound of breathing (something that happens throughout the film, often being all that cuts through the natural and prolonged silences). Air is, in the film and in many instances in life, the only thing that exists both inside and outside the body. What Diop is saying about women’s agency in speaking up is clear: expressing feelings and concerns is a right that should be exercised. A call-to-arms is portrayed with radical prowess in this modern masterpiece.
The Verdict
Alice Diop’s documentary history proves to come in handy in Saint Omer where she provides a depiction of the reality of women’s struggles more vividly and with more urgency than most filmmakers have been able to achieve to date.
Saint Omer releases in UK cinemas on Friday 3rd February.
Words by Oisín McGilloway
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