‘St. Omer’: The tears of Medea

the famous author Marguerite Duras made her debut as a screenwriter with the splendid ‘Hiroshima, mon amour’one of the magnum opuses of Alain Resnais, and wrote: “Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents. Otherwise we would suffocate”. Precisely, Alice Diop chooses to quote phrases from this film at the beginning of her fourth feature film (the first fictional one), ‘Saint Omer. The People Against Laurence Coly’, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 79th Venice Film Festival, where it also won the award for best first film, the same recognition obtained at the 48th edition of the César Awards. In addition to reaching the Giraldillo de Oro for Best Film at the 18th Seville Film Festival.

‘Saint Omer’ is inspired by the case of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2016 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing her 15-month-old daughter, Adelaïdeleaving her abandoned on a beach in Berck, in the Pas de Calais, where the little girl drowned, due to high tide, in 2013. The Supreme Court reduced her sentence to 15 years, adding that she would serve eight years in prison. judicial with which he should follow the psychiatric and psychological treatment, since he claimed to have killed his daughter, second the forensic psychologists of the case, when they undergo a “paranoid delusion”. Alice Diop herself witnessed the process, intuitively, as she has stated in multiple interviews.

Diop’s experience at the trial, which saw that most of those present were women, led him to recreate it in a fictional feature film, given the ban on having cameras inside the courtroom. Coincidences of life, the filmmaker herself became pregnant with her first child during the judicial process which marked her because it also made her face her own demons in the relationship he had in his childhood with his mother. Similarly, the infanticide was a woman of Senegalese origin, nationality of origin of the Diop family, born and raised in France.

The reference to Duras at the beginning of the film is not trivial, with a protagonist who changes his profession, being an important professor. Precisely, Duras was one of the first intellectuals who approached the female reality from an awkward perspective, recounting even the darkest parts of the feminine, without judging or entering into moral dilemmas. And it is that Diop’s cinema has been characterized by never meeting what prejudice expects from a director like her. The way he approached the social reality of his country with his previous feature films, such as ‘Nosotros’ or the medium-length film ‘Vers la tendresse’, with which he entered the male reality of the French suburbs in the background , was uncomfortable, courageous and with a unique look, which could very well be considered the heir to that of Claire Denisalbeit with a contemporary approach.

In the case of ‘Saint Omer’, Diop, who co-wrote the screenplay with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, juxtaposes the horror of infanticide with a judicial staging which, in turn, has a series of sequences that straddle the reflective and the contemplative, thus further deepening the feeling of discomfort of the case. Diop explores the reasons that led Kabou (renamed Laurence Coly in the fiction) to end the life of her 15-month-old baby. The director flaunts her experience as a documentary filmmaker Do not enter into moral or ethical judgmentsfocusing on the horror from the point of view of the professor who follows the case to read up on.

Alice Diop offers an uncomplacent look at female cruelty

AND Diop succeeds in the calm rhythm of the case, with which he creates a strange feeling of restlessness, which is reflected in the fears of the protagonist, a charming Kayije Kagame, who is forced to rethink the relationship she had with her mother, as well as her pregnancy. The filmmaker thus touches the dark sides of her motherhood, she does so by bringing down the idyllic image of the progenitor woman, also portraying postpartum depression in a humanistic way and how this, if left undetected, can lead to even greater depression. He has rarely been treated with an approach free from bias, even with the audacity to perform a certain exercise in empathy.

On the other hand though Diop’s central theme makes it universal, as most of the participants are women and, in the majority, Caucasians; Also, do not forget the social, cultural and racial approach, as the infanticide is a woman from Senegal, which in itself implies a different sociocultural background. However, once again, Diop reflects a reality that does not seek easy tears, as the killer is a woman who emigrated to Paris to study, who came from the upper middle class of Dakar, with a father secretary of the United Nations; with a perfect and intellectual pronunciation of French and that he was trying to be a philosopher, with Western references.

So Diop criticizes the understatement that the killer is a black and African woman. Yes, it shows them, as in the actual case Kabou was alleged to have suffered a “tribal curse” (As well as having gone to several santeros and others before committing the crime). However, Once again, Diop lets the public interpret that aspect as they see fit, not exempting the convict from responsibility. Masterful applause instead for the sober interpretation of Guslagie Malanda, with a series of extremely subtle nuances that make it a real revelation.

Finally, Diop shows a fragment of ‘Medea’, the film with which Pier Paolo Pasolini brought Maria Callas out of retirement, who was facing her first unsung role, transformed into the tragic sorceress and wife of Jason, who killed her children despite loving them, because possessed by hatred towards her husband, who denied her to marry Creusa, according to what Euripides showed in his tragedy. This contradiction, constant throughout the film, is most clearly exposed in this moment, in which the universality of the heinous crime that Coly commits in fiction is underlined.whom Diop looks as if she were a modern-day Medea.

‘Saint Omer’ is one of the most fascinating and most uncomfortable feature films of recent European cinema. It would be impetuous to say that this is the discovery of Alice Diop, even if this proposal has been classified as her first film, given her seniority as a documentary filmmaker. Rather, it could be classified as the impetus of a filmmaker with a unique perspective, who walks the line of the new generation of filmmakers enjoyed by French cinema and with whom show that the female perspective can be radically and profoundly subversive, as happens with Audrey Diwan, Rebecca Zlotowski or Julia Ducournau. An essential title.

Note: 9

The best: Her uneasy look at the cruel side of motherhood, reflecting her own human contradiction.

Worse: Its leisurely pace won’t appeal to those looking for a more conventional courtroom drama.