Starring: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valerie Dreville, Aurelia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Cantarella
Distributor: Palace Films
Runtime: 122 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2023
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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In France a mother is on trial for the killing of her 15-month-old baby. Rama, a literature professor and novelist, who travels from Paris to Saint-Omer to observe and write about the trial, finds herself challenged and changed by the case.
Saint Omer is the name of the town where a criminal case is being heard. A young migrant woman from Senegal is accused of killing her 15-year-old baby. The audience spends most of the film looking and listening to her as the camera remains focused on her as she stands in the dock. We, the audience, identify with the group of people in attendance to watch the proceedings, but, most especially, with a young woman, Rama. A university lecturer and novelist, Rama has come to observe the case to help her in her writing, her interest in the character of Greek character Medea, wife of Jason (and the Golden Fleece), who murders her children. But, as the film progresses, we become more intensely involved in the case, challenged, shocked but less judgmental.
The film is based on the true story of Fabienne Kabou, a mother who, in 2013, abandoned her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer at high tide. Diop, the film’s director and co-writer, attended the trial. In an interview, she commented, ‘I wanted to recreate my experience of listening to another woman’s story while interrogating myself, facing my own difficult truths. The narrative had to trace a series of emotional states that can lead to catharsis. It’s like accelerated psychotherapy.’
This film is definitely not an entertainment, with some wary cinemagoers complaining that they were bored, not interested, felt that the film took them nowhere. Those comments are disappointing. It is understandable that an audience might feel compelled by the cinema style and storytelling to move into an uncomfortable response, being challenged, asking whether they understood the motivation of the mother, here called Laurence Coly and portrayed marvellously by Malanda. There is repulsion at what she did in abandoning the child on the beach, but realising more and more, that she is, at least, mentally unstable.
But, we are also compelled to identify with Rama, another marvellous performance from Kagamie. Rama is a professional woman, competently lecturing with attentive students, her partner at home, but more and more revelation about a difficult relationship with her own mother. And, it emerges that Rama is pregnant, and listening to the testimony in court is disturbing and she considers parallels between herself and Coly who has had a distant relationship with her own mother but who is also present in the court and befriends Rama.
This is female oriented film, with female characters. The defender and the judges are all female.
There are complex relationships between mothers and daughters, mothers alienating daughters, mothers killing daughters. But there is also the theme of the interrelationship between mother and child in the womb – a profound physiological interconnection bonding mother and child.
As the audience spends so much time looking at Coly in the stand, we try to discern what is the truth, where she is lying, where she is self-deceiving, where she draws on some African traditions of curses and sorcery, leading to imagination and visions. We listen, we look, we try to read the body language, we focus on her facial expressions. She is an intelligent woman. She is well educated. She has left Africa, has tried to settle in France.
The film does reach a conclusion and it is expressed in the speech by the lawyer for the defence, the issue of justice, the issue of human understanding, issues of sanity and insanity, the role of prison, of the role of being confined to an internment for therapy and possible healing.
For an audience which wants a film to be challenging.
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