Do You See What I See?
Saint Omer and Sight & Sound
Watching
Saint Omer (2022)
French director Alice Diop won the second-place prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival for Saint Omer, her first narrative film in a short career built on documentaries. This felt to me like a notable parallel to the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, when director-actress Mati Diop (no relation) took the second-place prize for her first feature, Atlantics. Tying the two films together, aside from the directors’ similar Senegalese ancestry, is their cinematographer. Both Saint Omer and Atlantics were shot by Claire Mathon, a DP whose resume is capped by a series of films documenting subjects historically marginalized in cinema history: Stranger by the Lake, about gay men; Portrait of a Lady on Fire, about lesbians; and now Atlantics and Saint Omer, about Black women. Mathon typically works digitally (though she shot Pablo Larraín’s Spencer on film), and I find it interesting to note how the highest–profile new movies by Black women out of the festival world owe their looks to the same white woman.
Drawing on Alice Diop’s documentary background, Saint Omer is structured around a fictionalization of the 2016 court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of murdering her infant daughter. Diop had attended the trial and reconstructs it mostly verbatim from court transcripts and her own memories. As a point of identification for the audience, Diop introduces the character of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a cerebral teacher and novelist who makes the trip north from Paris to Saint Omer commune to take notes on the trial of Kabou stand-in Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga) for a forthcoming book tentatively inspired by the Medea myth. We see bits of Rama’s life before the trial—a university class she teaches on Marguerite Duras, her family life with her white parter, her two sisters, and a mother who is the source of some thinly-sketched conflict. At one point in the film she takes a call from her editor, who is ecstatic at her latest book sales, so I take it she is a world-historically brilliant writer.
Most of the film’s two hours are set in the courtroom, where we witness the Coly trial play out in long takes that border on the Wisemanesque. (If that comparison feels cheap, consider that New York Film Festival this year featured a conversation between Diop and Wiseman.) Diop’s shots lack the electricity that comes from catching the unpredictabilities of unvarnished human behavior in real time, but their longueur serves a definite purpose. The first portion of the trial, which must last some 30 to 40 minutes, doles out information slowly and deliberately. We watch Rama take her place among a sea of white townsfolk; the judge, a woman clad in stately black-and-red robes, selects the members of the jury; Coly, handcuffed, is brought to the stand, clothed in a brown jumper that nearly camouflages her against the wood panelling of the walls behind her.
The early stages of the trial are dedicated to a shot–reverse shot sequence of Coly and the judge as the latter asks the accused to explain why she killed her daughter. Coly admits to not understanding why herself, and to hoping that the trial will bring her some clarity if not outright exonerate her. The tête-à-tête draws out details of the case: the childhood in Senegal, the attempts at an education in France, the meeting of the man who would father the child. One can’t help but start to form an image of the people and places under discussion; Diop doesn’t give you much else to do.
This goes on for a while, when suddenly Diop cuts to a shot, from Rama’s perspective, of a third and heretofore unseen Black woman seated a few places in front of Rama. The reveal is destabilizing; as Diop had presented the trial to this point, we were likely to have assumed that Rama was the only other Black woman in attendance. Diop’s editing throughout the film continues to upend assumptions, not necessarily by shock value (though this cut is certainly shocking) so much as by revealing the limits of our perceptions and projections. (Coly’s child’s father, for instance, shows up to testify and is revealed to be a much older white man, identifying details that Coly does not disclose in her testimony—but is this how she made you picture him?)
Though Diop has said she made Saint Omer to grapple with her own experience of watching the Fabienne Kabou trial and the emotions it provoked for her, the way she films it bespeaks an interest in challenging the givenness of how Black women are perceived—and not only by white people. We eventually meet the third Black woman in the courtroom and learn that she is Coly’s mother, Odile (Salimata Kamate). Rama and Odile go to lunch on the second day of the trial; Rama orders steak-frites and Odile identifies her, correctly, as a few months pregnant—though she claims she knew as soon as she saw her. When court returns to session, Rama dissociates through the continued discussion of Coly’s infanticide, her exact motivations for which continue to elude everyone’s grasp. Diop cuts to a rare side view of Coly, who looks in the direction of the audience. Seeming to alight on Rama, her prison- and court-wearied face breaks into a smile.
Rama, devastated as much as the viewer likely is, leaves and breaks down in her hotel room. Neither she nor we know what Coly was thinking in that moment—a bid for connection, a flood of relief, certainly, at seeing another woman like her. But what is “like” about the two of them? Class is the obvious separator between Rama and Coly, and the latter is likely to be projecting her assumptions about an experience of the world as Black women that Rama may or may not actually share with her. But Rama also knows what Coly can’t—namely that Rama’s interest in the trial, as a woman with unresolved feelings about motherhood, is deeply personal, far beyond the surface (which is not to say superficial) similarities of being Black women in a world whose notions of justice and legal decorum were largely not designed with them in mind.
Coly is found guilty, to no one’s surprise. The trial surfaces plenty of evidence of how French society has stacked the books against immigrant Black women, without that evidence ever amounting to a reasonable justification for murdering a child one fears the future for. Coly’s wide-eyed defense attorney delivers the film’s closing monologue, an impassioned and slightly weird speech about how, biologically, mothers contain a part of their children, making them chimeras—or, in other words, monsters. Diop cuts to various women around the room (though neither Rama nor Odile) as they shed tears, presumably from their own investment in the trial as women and/or mothers. As the defense concludes, we hear one last set of tears offscreen and after holding for maximum suspense, Diop cuts to Coly, face down at her defender’s arm, sobbing.
Initially, this scene read a bit ambiguously to me. The defense feels contorted, and calling all women monsters of a sort wouldn’t seem to be doing Coly any favors, given that most of the witnesses to the trial probably already believed she was a monster before they ever set foot in the courtroom. Surely some other humanizing touch would have been called for. There’s something as well about the presence of those white women crying here that calls to mind other contexts where white women’s tears have a reputation for being more nefarious than empathetic (one only needs to think of the history, still ongoing, of white women defaming Black men of wrongs not committed). Diop’s pointed withholding of Rama and Odile from her montage of mourners makes me question if this speech is meant to be to go-for-the-juggular coup de grâce it might function as in another art film less concerned with destabilizing the conventional, especially white and Western interpretation of images. As this newsletter was getting ready to go to print, I listened to an interview with Diop where she reveals that the line about chimeras was her own creation adduced to a speech otherwise copied word-for-word from the court transcript. Even if she intended for the scene to aim at straightforward catharsis, I think what she actually achieved is a rather disorienting moment for the art house inclined, a rebuke to the need some of us have to understand the world through a certain kind of cinematic image.
In a short epilogue, Rama leaves Saint Omer while Nina Simone’s “Little Girl Blue” plays in full.1 On her way back to Paris, Diop splices in a few seconds of grainy home video footage (shot originally for the film) of a young Rama with her family, no doubt representative of the untold millions of hours of home videos shot by Black families around the world. Its presence here offers one final challenge to received filmmaking notions: is there any reason why Black life must be filtered through the customary forms of global art house cinema to be deemed worthy of honors, let alone a broader viewership? If Saint Omer is to have enduring significance beyond its festival laurels, I predict it will be not just for what it makes us see about the world but even more for making us question how we learned to see it that way in the first place.
Sight & Sound
Every 10 years the British Film Institute’s publication Sight and Sound polls film critics the world over for their 10 best films. The aggregated lists of said poll form a Greatest Films of All Time that has more or less served as the movie world’s definitive canon since the poll began in 1952. This year Chantal Akerman’s feminist ur-text of slow cinema, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, displaced 2012 champion Vertigo atop the list, with Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. all elbowing their way into the top 10. Nobody asked me, but if Sight and Sound had solicited my list, I would have cobbled together something like the following, a group of somewhat-strategically chosen films that I find personally, culturally, and aesthetically significant:
Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966)
Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
Privilege (Yvonne Rainer, 1990)
Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972)
Conte d’été (Éric Rohmer, 1996)
Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)
Also under consideration: La Belle Noiseuse, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Three Colors: Red, Cléo de 5 à 7, Cries and Whispers, News from Home, Andrei Rublev, Funeral Parade of Roses, City Lights, In a Lonely Place
Other noteworthy textual quotations I couldn’t fit into the above: Rama shows her class at the beginning of the movie footage from Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Caroline Shaw x Roomful of Teeth supply occasional non-diegetic noise; and her last night in her hotel room, Rama watches the ending of Pasolini’s Medea on Youtube.