Alice Diop’s Saint Omer Is a Harrowing Look at Ambivalent Motherhood
In the largely white seaside commune of Berck-sur-Mer, nestled in France’s northernmost reaches, literature professor Rama (Kayije Kagame) stands out. This is primarily a matter of her skin color, a rich, flawless pecan in striking contrast to the town’s oatmeal-hued locals. But there’s also the fact of her dimension, her statuesque frame. When she first arrives in Berck, people turn their heads. In the best case scenario, Rama’s steely beauty leaves them stunned. In the worst, they simply see her for her Blackness.
Rama’s outsider status is central to her role in Saint Omer, Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop’s latest film and departure from her traditional mode as a documentarian. Like Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, Saint Omer welds fiction with fact; it’s based on the awful case of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2016 was tried for leaving her 15-month-old child to her death on the beach at high tide. Diop attended the trial, and the experience clearly made an impression on her. Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other.
Like Diop, Rama travels to Berck to witness the trial of a woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old; here, that figure is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a student and Senegalese immigrant. And like Diop, Rama intends to fashion Laurence’s transgression into narrative fiction, as a retelling of the tale of Medea. (There’s a brief aside at one point in the film where Rama, defending her choice in inspiration from the concerns of her peers, asserts that everyone knows about Medea, a minor moment of wry comedy in an otherwise somber plot.) But Rama shares plenty in common with Laurence, too. They both have roots in Senegal. They both have prickly relationships with their mothers. Both of their romantic partners are white Frenchmen. Most of all, Rama is four months pregnant, and feels misgivings about her impending maternity.
Saint Omer positions Laurence’s trial to provide a mirror for Rama, who has difficulty stomaching Laurence’s step-by-step recounting of the night she left her little girl, Elise, full of milk and happily snoozing, on the shore. This isn’t an uncommon reaction. Diop, in a key moment, cuts from shot to shot of women in the courtroom, where most of Saint Omer takes place, capturing their reactions to the case’s dark specifics; each can be summed up as “horrified,” though horror is a spectrum so those reactions nonetheless vary. For Rama, Laurence’s trial is a trigger for her own recollections of how she grew up with her mother, and her fears that she’ll be the same kind of mother to her child as her mother was to her.