Saint Omer is affecting yet contrived feminist snake oil.
French documentarian Alice Diop is a good pupil — not a great one, but a studious grade-grubber who knows how to make her teachers swoon. In her undeniably skilled first fiction film, Saint Omer, Diop’s pop scholarship makes her the valedictorian of academic feminism, with a black-studies concentration.
Problem is: Saint Omer slants a real-life 2015 infanticide case so that Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), the black Frenchwoman on trial, becomes a martyr embodying obvious talking points of fourth-wave feminism — all the grievances pronounced since Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 Seneca Falls convention and the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
Diop concentrates on black female mystique through this bizarre example of a woman who kills her 15-month-old daughter. Everything from sexual exploitation (the concubinage of Senegalese immigrant Coly, beneath a way older white Frenchman) to postpartum depression and even the intellectual intimidation felt by contemporary female students is included. Diop structures her drama around the intimate, troubled responses of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a celebrated black “thinker” whose pregnancy is exacerbated by the Coly case.
Rama is Diop’s surrogate — a young intellectual analyzing the Coly trial for her next sure-to-be acclaimed book, similar to Diop embarking on this very accomplished thesis.
Saint Omer is all thesis footnotes. Diop’s visual style (made coherent by cinematographer Clare Mathon, who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is not just rigorously spare but evocative — from Rama’s dark nightmares to courtroom testimonies by social types representing feminism’s impact on France’s legal system.
Coly is always shown in amber tones. Her dark-brown skin and cinnamon blouses (at least three different chemises, one corrugated like chenille) merge with the blond-wood dock and wall behind her. She is both archetype and symbol. This confuses Rama, whose tall, thin body and long, chic braids — merging the third-world feminism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali with feminism’s new discontent — starkly contrast with Coly’s round, almond-eyed enigma. Despite superficial differences, there’s innate solidarity. Coly and Rama are both student intellectuals, experiencing European opportunities while feeling incomplete and disturbed.
Wittgenstein student Coly testifies, “I wanted to make my mark. I dreamed of becoming a great philosopher. My dream was cut short.” Rama is stymied by memories of her “broken” mother, whom Diop portrays through home videos and unsettling mother-daughter flashbacks.
Saint Omer — titled after a Parisian district but canonization implied — is an extraordinary contrivance. It exposes movies such as She Said and Women Talking for the trite nonsense they are, because Diop, a superior feminist student, first footnotes Marguerite Duras’s chronicle of women abused for their political dissent. Rama honors Duras for defining “a woman, an object of shame [who] becomes not only a heroine but a human being in a state of grace.” Next, Diop evokes Claire Denis, Godard, Sembène, and Haneke to make Coly a classical feminist model.
A female judge instructs, “All journalists leave the courtroom,” yet investigative reporter Diop/Rama stays put, editorializing on what happens. And from there, Diop brazenly footnotes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (starring Maria Callas), Abbas Kiarostami’s courtroom meta-film Close-Up, and Pedro Costa’s artful immigrant sanctifications. Whether or not you are familiar with those cultural bona fides, they’re the prelude to the film’s impressive climax.
Fiction allows Diop to break from documentary to impart emotion. Coly’s trial ends with a lawyer addressing the camera in a blatant speech about the moral imperative of female liberty: “This is the story of a phantom woman. A woman nobody sees, nobody knows. You will have handed down a judgment, but not justice. She didn’t hide her pregnancy, she hid herself.” Diop’s “invisible woman” thesis overrides a thorny abortion metaphor. It’s the argument of a robotic student. What sells it is Diop’s playing the guilt card and the race card. Rama’s final vision of her mother in a saffron African gown, slipping on tribal bracelets, earrings, and a gold necklace, sustains the color-coordinated courtroom motifs, confirmed when Coly gives Rama a complicit Mona Lisa smile.
A family-of-woman montage shows courtroom observers devastated by the defense attorney’s summation: “We women, we are all chimeras. We carry within us the traces of our mothers and our daughters in a never-ending chain.” Saint Omer becomes a high-brow tearjerker. No man born of woman can resist this snake oil. But I scoff at the closing song by Nina Simone, the saint of female masochism, singing Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue.”
This particular footnote made me wonder why Diop didn’t cite Tony Richardson’s 1961 film Sanctuary, an adaptation of Faulkner’s Pylon, which starred black folksinger Odetta as a woman on trial for killing her white employer’s daughter, or Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece Beloved, from Toni Morrison’s novel, tracing the historical and spiritual effects of slavery. Diop portrays Coly and Rama affectingly but really honors her feminist mentors and their condescending, political sanctimony. (No surprise then that progressive media hail Diop’s propaganda.) Apprentice Diop never learned about more complicated art like Demme’s and Richardson’s that transcends feminist self-pity.
