At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.
The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.
The audience, like the jury, can decide for themselves how much they believe her, but Diop isn’t interested in making a wholly objective screen Rorschach test. Instead, she assumes the conflicted viewpoint of a nominally detached observer, successful author and fellow Senegalese descendant Rama (Kayjie Kagame), who sees Medea-type dynamics in Coly’s story, and aims to write something about it. She’s not prepared, however, for the tacit connection she feels with this infamous stranger, as a woman, as an African and as an expectant mother. By inviting us into Rama’s perspective, Diop’s stoic, wholly unsentimental study in empathy invites audiences to consider their own affinities and prejudices regarding this case – how they can bring us closer to, or further from, an unhappy truth.
The humane austerity that Diop brings to what could have been luridly emotive true-crime material is quietly radical: the film’s steady, soulful watchfulness might point to her instincts as a documentarian, but also suggests the imposition of a non-western narrative sensibility on a story where Hollywood has shaped our instincts and expectations. In a script largely sewn from court records, Diop permits herself one climactic speech, delivered with measured calm and minimal table-banging, and one musical flourish: Nina Simone’s rendition of Little Girl Blue, played patiently in full, aching with recognition for legions of unheard Black women. But otherwise, this extraordinary film won’t be pushed toward convention, catharsis or conclusion: Diop, like her uncertain observer, is both ally and analyst to one woman’s riveting, unreliable history.
