There are many ways to transfix the camera. In Saint Omer, from director Alice Diop, Guslagie Malanda does it with stillness. She plays Laurence Coly, a young Senegalese immigrant on trial in the French town of the title for murdering her infant daughter. With the camera fixed on Malanda in the witness box—the warm tones of her skin, sweater, and the courtroom’s wood paneling all playing off each other to paint a benignly handsome portrait—she barely bats an eyelid while Coly undergoes intense questioning about her family, her personal history, and her heinous act (which she fully admits). And yet underneath—and with the occasional flutter of an eyelid—we sense the roiling of a woman at a loss for how she ended up where she is. The performance, while personal, also allows Coly to be something of a Rorschach test. Like the judge, jury, attorneys, and audience, almost all of whom are white and French by birth, we project onto Coly our own assumptions—based not on what she presents, but our individual backgrounds and prejudices. While Malanda’s Coly is riveting, the film’s central figure is actually Rama (Kayije Kagame), an academic who is writing a book based on the case for both personal and political reasons. (Like Coly, Rama his family ties to Africa, including mothers with whom both women have contentious relationships.) As witness testimonies provide more details (and more angles on Coly), the question at the heart of the case—who is the “responsible party”—becomes more complicated. Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.
(12/9/2022)
