Much is made of the allowance to speak. Yet speech is never outside of the unequal distribution of power that not only constrains who is allowed to speak but also the terms of what can be said and how it will be heard. Particularly in his fiery first publication, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon diagnosed how language, French in the context of colonization, was a tool of political and cultural control. For French colonial subjects, the mere fact of speaking their colonizer’s language was subordination. This collision of language and power is perhaps concentrated nowhere more than in the law. The modern legal apparatus of the French state is determined by an inheritance of colonialism, imperial domination, racial oppression and persistent patriarchy. What could a black woman, Senegalese and a mother, expect of this law and these conditions of speech?
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) dramatizes this fraught position. After an impressive trajectory of almost two decades of documentary filmmaking, Diop’s first fiction feature is only a slight shift in form, extending the same concerns that have guided her work as a documentarian: immigration, gender, blackness, colonialism, and class. For her latest film, she drew directly from a headline tragedy. In 2013, Fabienne Kabou, a young woman studying philosophy, left her 15-month-old daughter—Adélaïde, but called Ada—to drown on a cold beach in Berck, in the north of France. The director was captivated by the story and attended the public trial, gripped by the similarities between her and Kabou, both of them being Franco-Senegalese and having children with white fathers.
Diop translated this visceral, uncanny fixation into a collaborative script. Saint Omer was written with Amrita David, her close collaborator and the film’s insightful editor who also attended Kabou’s trial, and the acclaimed author Marie NDiaye, whose earlier screenwriting credit was on Claire Denis’s White Material (2009)—a quite different engagement with French colonization. In their hands, Fabienne Kabou becomes Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), remains a philosophy student, and the heartbreaking nominal intimacy has her daughter named Elise but referred to as Lili. The fictional narrative also split the film’s focus between her and Rama (Kayije Kagame), a writer and professor pregnant with her own biracial child who sits in on the trial—not serving as a fictional avatar for Diop but drawing on her position as a witness in that courtroom.
Giving the film its title, the story stays in the north of France but moves from Berck to Saint-Omer. Across two hours, which mostly take place in the courtroom, the shared and distinct experiences of these two Franco-Senegalese, highly educated women crystallize Saint Omer’s central preoccupation: motherhood. This elegantly constructed film is a devastating archeology of mothers and mothering, which lays bare an ultimate horror—infanticide—without the comfort of a simple moral condemnation. Offering an ethical post-mortem, Saint Omer presents the mundane universalities of motherhood as a recognition that its incomprehensible, monstrous, extremities are also available to all, while critically contextualizing the effects of motherhood colliding with immigration, colonization, and blackness.
On the surface, Diop’s film might appear as a courtroom drama. Yet it sits uneasily within the constraints of genre, presenting less a fulfillment of a formula than a refusal of its protocols. If the normative expectations of a courtroom drama are theatrics, exterior spectacle, and a rhetorical development that leads to a definitive verdict, then Saint Omer is almost the opposite, breaking with these procedural conventions. What the film does express is the exhaustive claustrophobia of those circumstances, with a disarming patience that leaves the viewer in a chilly trance.
The sensitivity to distance and proximity Diop cultivated in her documentary filmmaking is reflected in the visual architecture of Saint Omer. Long takes shape the film’s slowly accumulating tension, revealing the hand of cinematographer Claire Mathon—who also worked on Mati Diop’s haunting love story and indictment of global capitalism set in Senegal, Atlantique (2019). Saint Omer is a work of unhurried portraiture, with Diop and Mathon’s orchestration knowing precisely when to let the camera be still and when to let it drift. Diop is also a studied filmmaker. Aesthetically legible and confirmed by the director in interviews are the influences of the distressing close-up portraits in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the mannequin-like stillness of Robert Bresson, the confluence of lighting and grief in Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (2019) and the dilated visual patience of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries. The long takes of the courtroom in Saint Omer also privilege listening and strip down the spectacle. They heighten an awareness of the courtroom as inherently a space of performance and of storytelling, concentrating on the low frequency of visual and verbal exchanges.
While Diop has always been a literary filmmaker, it has never been as evident as in this latest film. The filmmaker is devoted to carefully calibrated language—which is reflected in Rama’s character being a writer, the collaboration with NDiaye in particular and the way the script was constructed by relying on the exact language of court transcripts from Kabou’s case. This collides with how Saint Omer deals with matters of language and the law. Laurence, as a defendant, is not invited but forced to speak in the courtroom. The legal structure invites a re-consideration of the exhausting framings of “voicelessness” for those excluded from systems of power, as though the only corrective would be in those same terms. Saint Omer stages a crisis of testimony that shows there is no universal benefit in “having a voice.” A platform to speak is not freedom. It is not a favor or a gift but in itself already a condemning sentence that cages her in the law of a state, whose brutal and disavowed history of colonialism on the African continent has everything to do with what she endured before the killing of her child.
The complex dynamics of the film make it so that even while Rama is professionally attached to words and language through her writing, her grace is that she is in that courtroom with the safety of silence. In fact, Rama says very little throughout the film, and is exemplary of how the powerful performances of both actors, Kagame and Malanda, are expressively embodied.
Further, as much as it relies on language, Saint Omer is also a circuitry of open and veiled gazes, stringing together complicities and hostilities marked in the act of looking. While any courtroom is a visual enclosure shaped by restraint and control, Diop and Mathon also create a precise and patient observational field. There is the only direct point of contact between Rama and Laurence in the narrative: when their eyes meet. This encounter takes place close to the end of the film, after Laurence’s mother Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate) testifies to the truth of her daughter’s claims to have been influenced by maraboutage. A cut to Rama looking at the window carries into a breakdown of the scene, as Diatta’s voice fades away to be replaced with heavy breathing and an airy vocal soundtrack. The film seemingly dissolves into Rama’s distressed emotional and mental state, as a white man in the courtroom is heard speaking about the particularities of an African woman with the demeaning and othering tone of an anthropologist. This diffusion of the scene brings together cultural norms in Senegal, and much of West Africa, which are demonized, dismissed or otherwise illegible in the French context and a manifestation of the ethnographic white gaze in. As also emerged in the Kabou case, Saint Omer unveils the way colonial dynamics force the ordinariness of maraboutage and other cultural, spiritual, religious under the ignorant microscope of assumed Western rationality and scientific superiority.
This complex is what precedes the brief but stunning encounter between Laurence and Rama, where the former has a small smile, while the latter appears on the verge of tears and runs out of the courtroom. Their meeting of the gaze crystallizes the entangled forms of identification and alienation in the film. The stark difference between their emotional states in that exchange accentuates an irreconcilable difference in how they find themselves positioned: one is condemned to be in the courtroom and unable to leave, the other has come of her own volition and can exit when she needs to. What plays out in Saint Omer are also carceral and classed logics. Yet that point of contact is also a confirmation of their peculiar connection as misaligned doubles for each other. The uneasy parallel between Rama and Laurence is the key relationality in Diop’s film. In mechanical terms: they are both Senegalese and French, they are both highly and formally educated and have pursued knowledge supposedly beyond their scope, one was a mother the other will soon be, and the fathers of their children are white, French men.
Rama and Laurence are also united in stepping out of bounds, in having the audacity to master the knowledge systems weaponized against them. When Rama’s character is introduced, she is teaching. She first appears almost regally positioned behind a lectern and speaking to her students about the function of literature in confronting historical horror, through her reading of Marguerite Duras’s work on Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais). Rama’s upcoming book project, which is the reason she is sitting in on Laurence’s trial, also involves watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 cinematic adaptation of the Ancient Greek myth of Medea, who also committed…
