Opening on a lost mother facing the vastness of an ocean. The screams of a child. Then Rama's brutal awakening (Kayije Kagame), novelist preparing to attend Laurence Coly's infanticide trial (Guslagie Malanda) in the small town of Saint-Omer. The more the days pass, the more sordid the case will infuse Rama's mind, stagnating between this provincial court and a room she rented for the occasion.
Fiction?
Alice Diop fiction for this Saint Omer After a career already rich in documentary. Named in the category best first film by an academy of Caesars who does not seem to regard the documentary as a part of the cinema, Saint Omer Since then, he has made his way. First prize of the GIFF, Lion Silver at the Mostra, envisaged to represent France at the Oscars... Saint Omer marked the cultural year 2022, until they released these days in physical format. The opportunity to dive into this excellent title...
As a good documentary writer, Diop has taken on a real fact-various that shook France in 2013: the Fabienne Kabou affair. On a autumn night, the young woman will abandon her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer. Denying everything, Kabou's defense will weaken little to little until a disorder of unsaid history appears. Between the opaque relations that she has, a deep loneliness that fills her and the invocation of a maraboulage from which she would be the victim, she will eventually confess to having premeditated the murder of her own daughter by choosing a day of great tide and selected Berck for the execrable sound of her name. Fabienne Kabou will eventually be sentenced to 15 years in prison.
From the fact that the film
Diop's L-alter ego in the film is Rama, a subsequent novelist, day after day, the evolutions of the trial to feed the pages of his next writings, like for example by Emmanuel Carrère and his book The adversary. The French writer narrated the Romand affair in a book published in 2000 which was subsequently adapted to cinema by Nicole Garcia.
Diop, unable to film the trial directly, will black out his notebooks and then use the fictional formol to examine this macabre event. Because that's what it's about... The director takes fiction as a tool to create a documentary, stripping it of any parasitic character: staging taps at the eye, screenplays to the outside or using the spectacular.
« What we can't talk about, we have to shut him up. »
Documentary integrity
Laurence Coly says she's studying Wittgenstein, we'll come back. But the reference to the Austrian philosopher is not annoyed, and the comparison with the quotation highlighted above is particularly suitable for Saint Omer.
Indeed, Diop will strive to apply the philosopher's maxim through his feature film. His filmic language will never summon the unspeakable. It leaves the fact different in itself to a short incise – of which it even suggests a dreamlike character – to focus almost exclusively on the next trial. An instance where Diop's documentary will translated again: aside from some name changes – Kabou becomes Coly and Alice Diop finds her alter ego in the character of Rama – everything is real, until the restitution of the verbatims of the trial. All or almost all, since the court is reconstituted to embrace the director's total desire for purity.
Ton on tone
The plan is resolutely long. The almost cold staging. Everything in the decor of this court is built to allow to return in mirror the character of Rama, sitting in the audience, of Laurence's, on the bench of the accused. Two black women, young and educated: Coly makes sure to write about Wittgenstein while Rama, the writer, teaches at university. Two women have been crossed by the same desire to give birth. The first one realized the unthinkable, the second one is pregnant and scares to probe the darkest basements of his personality. The macabre of the trial spatters, the reflection that is given to him through this Laurence Coly with banal appearances unshakable.
Horror(s)
An unspeakable and out-of-the-box horror, if it excludes a sceneHiroshima, my love showing the mower of Nevers. An image of the Liberation which is rarely seen, and which one wants to remember too little: this prolongation of fascist practices applied to the body of the woman, which is mutilated with apparently temporary pain (« the hair grows », as Rama points out) but whose violence will make the soul humiliated. This excerpt, inserted by Diop at the beginning of the film, is intended to be programmatic of the discourse of her own feature film where she has her two face-to-face Medeas: the one who killed, and the one who could go to act. The potentiality of infanticide is born in the flesh of the child, in this fertilized matrix where otherness is believed to flirt with monstrosity.
A female bruise that will unite, in one of the final scenes, the accused as well as Rama or the president of the court. Of the immobileness and the sheerness of the plans, of Laurence Coly's stiff and immobile stature, melting in the wooded decor of the court, of Rama's impenetrable gaze, Diop gradually creates an emotion that will crystallize in the last argument. Saint Omer is a rough film that manages in its ultimate plans to create a power and a terrifying reflection. Clearly one of the great films of this year cinema 2022!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 118 min
Release Date: 04 April 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
[...] Another young director's film, Saint Omer d'Alice Diop, is also thought of in Le Ravissement. In fact, the winner of the César for the best first film and Le Ravissement [...]