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First, the true circumstances of the case are more shocking than most fictionalized ones: In November 2013, a mother and her 15-month-old daughter traveled by train from Paris to France’s northern coast. She checks into a hotel, walks to the water at night, feeds the hungry children, and then lets her drown at high tide.
The mother, Fabienne Kabou, who went on trial in 2016, admitted killing and spoke of witchcraft and witchcraft, but added: “The story doesn’t make any sense.”
Sitting in that courtroom was French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop. Like Kabou, a woman of Senegalese descent, Diop became fascinated by the case because she saw a blurry surveillance photo in a newspaper and thought, “I know her so well, I recognize myself.” She Sit in court for days, staring at the woman in front of you, trying to comprehend the impossible.
What emerged from that experience was fascinating “Saint Omer” Diop’s debut feature, but it’s actually a film somewhere between documentary and scripted narrative, between truth and fiction. Most crucially, it’s a film so original in its approach that it feels like only Diop could have made it or even conceived it.
Whether it answers the question an empathetic defense attorney would ask a jury to consider — not if, but why — is less clear. But the film, which Diop co-wrote with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, strips away so many layers just by asking it—first, those of race, gender, motherhood, and the enduring effects of French colonialism—and finally, you might It feels like the answer isn’t really the point.
Diop opens with a brief scene on a dark beach, a woman walking with something, and waves growing in the distance. This scene turned out to be a dream, experienced by Rama, a French novelist and professor of Senegalese descent. Rama is Diop’s surrogate; she’s obsessed with infanticide stories and wants to base her next novel on them.
Soon, like Diop, Rama (a soulful Kayije Kagame) is headed to the coast, sitting on a bench into the wood-paneled courtroom (the movie set is next door to the real courtroom), with defendant Lauren Scoley, a fictional The double, for Cab, faces a methodical but disbelieving judge (Valerie Dreville).
Lawrence is not the type of defendant anyone expected—part of what makes it both fascinating and disturbing. The fact that she is highly educated surprised the media and others. Even Lamarr’s book editor in Paris told her that he had heard Lawrence speak in a “sophisticated” way; Ramarr retorted that she spoke like any other educated woman.
We learn that Lawrence’s mother in Senegal, obsessed with her education and upward mobility, keeps her daughter from speaking her native Wolof, only French. “Her obsession with my success tormented me,” she testified. (Heartbreakingly, her mother was at the trial, bought all the newspapers she could, and was proud of her daughter for making headlines.) As for her father, when she left France, he severed ties and stopped funding her studies in France. Law to philosophy.
Lacking the resources to survive, Lawrence eventually had to stop his studies and move in with his older white boyfriend, Luke, who kept their relationship a secret from his family. When she became pregnant, keeping the child against Luc’s wishes, she withdrew from the world entirely. When Luc appeared in court, the judge pointed out that the supposedly conscientious father didn’t even attend the baby’s funeral – which was too much, the man complained. “It’s very abstract to me.”
All testimonies are from official records, and Guslagie Malanda brings Lawrence and a supporting cast of theater actors to life. The audience is played by local townspeople and the process is filmed in chronological order, all of which contribute to a documentary-style feel.
But unlike the documentary, we’re witnessing it all through Rama. She’s appalled not just by the crime, but by the big and small prejudices against Lawrence — herself as a woman, as a woman of color, as a scholar in a white world — and as a daughter, an often Treat her mother selfishly.
There is another similarity between Rama and Laurence: Rama is pregnant. postpartum depression). Lamarr was lying in bed with her partner one night when she told him, “I’m afraid I’m going to be like her.” She was talking about her mother, she clarified. or is it?
“I hope this trial will give me an answer,” someone says at the beginning of the film. If you thought it was Rama or Judge, you are wrong. It was Lawrence herself, who admitted in a stunned court she had no explanation for standing aside.
Likewise, Diop refuses to wrap her films in neat bows. In fact, she doesn’t even tell us what verdict, if any, Kabou received (Google it.) But in her unique way, she brings us closer to the emotional, social and moral rifts of this real case than any documentary Can. We do it better.
The super release “Saint Omer” has been rated PG-13 by the American Motion Picture Association for “some thematic elements and brief strong language”. Runtime: 122 minutes. Three and a half stars, four stars.
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