Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dreville, Aurélia Petit
Intro:
… a dark and brooding tale full of mythic resonances.
It might be perverse to say so, but colonialism has left something fruitful in its legacy. At least in the sense that it has given postcolonial artists a rich vein of sorrow and anger to mine. France, like other European nations, ruled and plundered large parts of Africa (Senegal included) for centuries and now, with the generations of migrants and refugees, comes a partial reckoning. This forms much of the backdrop to this drama but, like everything else in the film, it is not done in a painting by numbers way. Emerging French-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop (who co-wrote) has skillfully woven a dark and brooding tale full of mythic resonances.
It centres on two women of African descent who lives are both parallel and very different. Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a tall rangy academic and writer. In the opening part of the film, we see her at home with her (white) husband and their friends. She seems okay but there is something unsettled about her manner. She appears to be unresolved about a whole series of issues. She decides to head to the sleepy town of Saint-Omer in Northern France, where there is a case that is so shocking that it has attracted the nation’s attention (the film is based on a true story and the director attended the actual trial).
A young mother called Laurence (Guslagie Malanda) is accused of the infanticide of her little daughter. Actually, the facts aren’t really in dispute, and Laurence answers all the questions put to her quite implacably. At times, she seems to have been living in a fantasy world, but her actions are real enough. Questions of motive and of how much criminal responsibility a post-partum depressed mother can be expected to bear, hover around the courtroom debates.
Much of the two-hour film takes place in the courtroom. While the tropes of a courtroom drama have to be there, Diop is not so much interested in the mechanics of how the advocates address the public or the judges. Only in the summing-up does she let the philosophical and poetic flourishes soar. For the most part, we are left with large spaces in the narrative and the logic. The director does this on purpose and it allows her to draw us into a terrain that is both primal and mythic. Is Laurence to be compared to a Medea–like avenger (in Euripides’ Greek Tragedy, Medea kills her own children as an act of revenge)? Or, is she better viewed as an oppressed black woman who has been driven to the edge of an unwelcoming society? None of these shorthand descriptions quite fit all the facts or the true motive. Or if they do, they still seem to miss something somehow.
Diop tells us everything and nothing and leaves us instead to speculate, and to ponder the unresolvable and eternally true ambivalences of human nature and nurture.
