Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 122 minutes
Release Date: November 23rd, 2022 (France) / January 13th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Les Films du Losange / Super LTD
Director(s): Alice Diop
Writer(s): Alice Diop & Amrita David and Marie N’Diaye

I hope this trial will give me the answer.

Why doesn’t Rama (Kayije Kagame) want her family to know she’s pregnant? That’s the central question I took from an extended prologue of sorts wherein she and her white husband Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery) visit her Senegalese mother and sisters for a meal before leaving Paris on a work trip. Everyone exchanges their usual pleasantries, asking what they’ve been up to, etc. Adrien is careful with his language when explaining that they won’t be vacationing this year because of a “major project” to complete at the house. He looks at Rama to deliver the news and she avoids the subject, dismissing the implication completely. Why?

Alice Diop and her co-writers (Amrita David and Marie N’Diaye) set the stage for Saint Omer to deliver a simple answer: that Rama is nervously unsure of what’s to come. From an opening dream calling out for her own mother to the obvious strain in their present-day relationship, we can assume she fears becoming that which she now resents. And it’s not without reason once memories of conflict and emotional repression rear their head. How much of who her mother is will rub off once she’s a mother herself? Is giving birth a mistake? Will attending the trial of a young woman accused of infanticide help her to see that things could be worse? Or will doing so prove they already are?

The juxtaposition is ultimately a heartbreaking one since the reality of Laurence Coly’s (Guslagie Malanda) case proves much more complex than the news reports her very conservative and white community of Saint-Omer depict. They paint her as a murderer. A monster. And she doesn’t necessarily disagree since she admits to the crime. But not to the guilt. Her defense is sorcery—that her aunts cursed her. Her attorney’s defense is insanity. The truth lies somewhere in-between once details reveal that Laurence’s circumstances are so heavily steeped in cultural bias and racist imperatives. People ask how this “intelligent” and “eloquent” Black woman could do such a thing? But how do either of those attributes matter?

Laurence’s parents put undue pressure upon her to be unimpeachable in white society. She moved to France to get away from that unspoken oppression only to find herself in Saint-Omer with an older white boyfriend (Xavier Maly’s Luc Dumontet) and an increasingly hostile air of “otherness” that led to an unhealthy seclusion. Her entire life was thus dictated by this idea of manufactured perception—to be that which others demanded rather than finding that which she embraced. Rama sees her own insecurities projected throughout the courtroom. The preconceptions. The assumptions. The casual disregard for the fifteen-month-old victim in lieu of deciding which adult was more at fault for her death.

Reading that much of the on-screen scenario was born from lived experience (Diop, like Rama, sat in on a real infanticide trial herself) makes sense considering how meticulously rendered and performed the courtroom scenes are. But also because of the emotions Diop imbues via her actors’ performances and her decision to splice in Rama’s silent memories of a tired mother struggling to survive under the weight of unjust expectation. The comparison allows for a refocused understanding of who this woman was. Because while motherhood is inherently scary and the past, present, and future of one’s own DNA and environment exacerbate that terror, knowing this truth can also be a blessing. No matter how alone you may feel, you never truly are.

Saint Omer had an Oscars-qualifying run on December 9th, 2022.

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Kayije Kagame in Alice Diop’s SAINT OMER. Courtesy of Neon.