In “Saint Omer,” the taut courtroom drama by French-Senegalese director Alice Diop, the revelations arrive not in the totality of the evidence, not between the imposing walls of the courtroom, or in the loneliness of a witness. It happens in the silent spaces between the words, and in the unconscious spasm of a muscle.
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The accused is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a student and Senegalese immigrant who arrived in France for school, but now finds herself on trial for the murder of her baby. No one can understand why she would commit such a heinous act. And no one buys her explanation of a curse haunting her. The case draws the attention of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a literature professor, presently expecting a baby, hoping to use the trial as the basis for her next book project. In the abundantly white town of Saint Omer, Rama and Coly and another Black woman stick out. And, in the words and actions of each other, they further interrogate the deeply hidden fears, insecurities and turmoil they’ve experienced living in an environment hostile toward their foreignness and race.
Through long takes and acute compositions (rendered in absorbing detail by director of photography Claire Mathon), Diop crafts a gripping and patient interrogation of delusion, isolation, suppressed trauma, and the difficulties of motherhood, building toward a cathartic final scene that makes the obscured, clear, and the incomprehensible, palpable.
The Playlist spoke with Diop about casting her two enigmatic leads, the influence of Frederick Wiseman, and the Nina Simone needle drop that somehow, while acting as a balm, still manages to break you open.
The Playlist: Why did you feel a fiction format would work better for this story rather than a documentary?
Alice Diop: I made a fiction film because it was the only possible form to tell this story. It was after the fact, meaning that the trial had already happened and that I needed the trial to understand the necessity of making this film; and also to think through how to make the film. Paradoxically, making it as a fiction film, I think allowed me to go further, beyond the limitations of literal reality.
In what ways did making this a fictional film allow you to push the themes beyond what would’ve been possible in a documentary?
This trial has so many meanings. It has so many entrances and ways of thinking. It has so many things that it says in and of itself that I think the character of Rama, who is a fictional character, despite what people think; people think this is my alter ego, and that’s not really the case. This character was very specifically written to reveal what the documentary material was saying to me. In a way, the character of Rama is like a tool I use to go into this material from the perspective of my own subjectivity, from that subjectivity of a Black woman. And it’s expressed by Rama
What I mean is that there are 15 possible films from this material, 15 possible films by 15 different women, by 15 different filmmakers. I made Alice Diop’s film about this material that deals specifically with daughters of mothers who have experienced exile and specifically a Black woman looking at this link to maternity. Now that’s something that all women, in fact, all people share. All of these themes are both very personal and universal, and they are the ways that I look at this specific story.
You approached Malanga and Kahame a year in advance, what occurred during the year between you meeting them and actually casting them?
I wrote the film thinking about them because I had met them years earlier. I cast them for what their bodies and their way of being in the world said to me. I often say that I did a documentary casting for this film because I chose these women not for what they were going to perform, but for who they are as women. But that’s not something that I articulated to myself clearly at the outset. In fact, I did a long casting process where I saw numerous women, and I saw the actresses that I did choose several times over that period of one year. I think I had an intuition from the outset that it was going to be them, but I didn’t really know that. And so I saw other actresses, and as this process continued, that intuition was confirmed, and that year that passed was also, I think, the time that was required for these two lead actresses to enter into their roles.
So much of what occurs with Rama happens internally. What conversations did you have with Kagame about expressing the emotional journey of the character?
Well, Rama specifically is a very silent character, and the film is built on this other woman who has to talk, who’s talking all the time, who has to formulate things, even things that she doesn’t understand. Whereas Rama does not talk, but through the words of this other woman, something is revealed to her about herself. And so it all has to do for Rama and her body. And that’s what we really worked on.
I had the actress work with a French choreographer, a woman who’s a good friend of mine, to really work on her physical trajectory throughout the film so that we really see her hear and receive Laurence’s words, and we see what that does to her body. That’s really what’s at the core of this film, is speech and the body. And so with Rama, it was really working on the body to express as much as possible in basically stillness and what she could do with her face. In a way, she’s like a character in a silent film. The work was on how to make her body speak.
That still, of course, carries over compositionally. Did you storyboard beforehand?
This is a film where most of the shots are sequence shots, very long shots, excessively long shots compared to the norm of film. You know, there are 20-minute shots. And what I wanted were very contradictory and subjective feelings. No viewer has the same experience when listening, for instance, to what Laurence is accused of in the court, or when listening to Laurence’s life story. It’s going to be different whether you are a man or a woman, a Black woman, a white woman.
What I wanted was for everyone to live their own experience in seeing this and to have something within them and perhaps be shaken or destabilized. And it’s something that I can’t name because it’s a film that’s hospitable to all experiences. But the thing that I wished for is for the viewer to live an experience that was going to move them. Not move as in move emotionally, but shift him or her and to go through something.
Many of the long takes, of course, recall Frederick Wiseman. What were your influences while making “Saint Omer?”
In terms of influences of specific films, I wouldn’t say there was a direct dialogue between filmmakers and this film. It’s more like films that made me work and that helped me find my own language. And in the case of “Saint Omer,” there’s Frederick Wiseman’s film “Welfare.” Which has nothing to do with “Saint Omer.” But in “Welfare,” there’s this sequence shot of a Black woman called Valerie Jones. It’s a 40-minute shot, and it’s like a short story is told on her face about the tragedy of her dealing with the American administration.
There’s something in Wiseman’s sequence shots, and I can refer to this one in “Welfare,” but I could also refer to one in “Public Housing,” in which we see a 17-year-old Black woman, who has a baby who’s on the phone with a government agency, there’s something about these sequence shots that make us look at people that we never look at and experience a tragedy that we’re able generally protect ourselves from. And so that question of the sequence shot in my film comes from Frederick Wiseman.
I could also refer to Robert Bresson, for instance. In his film, “Procès de Jeanne d’Arc,” the way it’s stripped down to the frame, his trust in the duration of the shot and the frame. I think there’s a dialogue there.
There’s also a film by Raymond Depardon called “The 10th Judicial Court: Judicial Hearings.” But what I do with the shot that I’m talking about in Depardon, is subvert it in a sense. Because Depardon’s film is a documentary and my film borrows from it to go in the opposite direction towards something that is nearly on the level of abstraction and theater. So rather than pure influences, I would say that these are things that help me build my own language.
I’m usually very suspicious of directors using a Nina Simone needle drop. Mostly because so many do it, and their scenes rarely work without the power of her music. But your use of her song “Little Girl Blue” is different and really captures the emotion of the song independent of the composition. Why that song?
I think that the last scene of a film can be very hard. We worked with my editor [Amrita David], who’s also a co-writer of the film, from the basis of the emotional charge of this film. That emotional charge is held in its restraint. But when we get to the scene of the plea for the defense, that emotion is released. An emotion is deployed that until then has been contained. I would say that in this film, you don’t have a relationship to emotion or feeling that’s pornographic. It’s really been contained. We held it until the end. And then the song after that somehow consoles or repairs us.
Nina Simone’s voice is like the sublime prolongation of the words of the law. There’s something about the power of her voice that repairs us and also repairs the little girl who is never seen throughout the film, but who we hear about throughout the film. She is consoled by Nina Simone. In a sense, we’re all little girls at that point. It really has to do with the idea of care, the care in the voice, the care in the lyrics, and what Nina Simone means to me and to us.
“Saint Omer” arrives in theaters on January 13.