We in no way planned it, but it is pretty fun that we’ll be reviewing Saint Omer and Anatomy of a Fall back-to-back today and tomorrow. For whatever reason, these two legal dramas were also two of the biggest arthouse exports from France these last couple years, and having already seen Anatomy, it was hard not to think of it while watching Saint Omer. There are plenty of differences between the two movies, but they also more or less explore the same overall idea that as cold and exacting as the criminal justice system can be, it becomes a lot more complicated when things like love and relationships and motherhood are involved.
That said, the one aspect where Saint Omer and Anatomy of a Fall diverge completely is on the topic of whether the defendant actually committed the crime or not. Throughout the film, we follow Rama (played by Kayije Kagame), a professor working on a non-fiction novel about Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman who killed her 15-month old baby by drowning her on a beach. Rama travels from Paris to Saint-Omer to witness the trial of this woman, and without getting much pretext, we’re thrust into the trial, which very quickly gets us to the facts and circumstances of the case, yet no one (including Coly) seems to know why this tragedy happened.
After Coly openly admits that she killed the child, she still pleads not guilty. We then get to learn her circumstances when the crime happened, such as that she’s a Senegalese immigrant, she was a student that had trouble staying in school, and that she had the child with a much older married man who she’d had an affair with. As we learn more about Coly’s circumstances and see how the defense and prosecution question her (as well as the child’s father), we get to see Rama’s reactions to the case. First, we see that Rama struggles with it because she is newly pregnant, but we also get flashbacks to Rama’s childhood and get little glimpses into her relationship with mother, while the film only gives us enough hard details of Rama’s experiences that we kind of have to fill in the blanks in terms of what she’s feeling watching this trial unfold.
I think what makes Saint Omer unique as a courtroom drama is that it’s the only courtroom movie I can think of where an emphasis is put just as much on the people in the gallery as there is on the judge, lawyers, and the defendant. Don’t get me wrong, we spend a lot of time with the camera placed firmly on Coly, as her vacant stare while reciting heartwrenching details is one of the most haunting things about the movie. But at the same time, director Alice Diop takes the time to occasionally put her camera on the people listening to this story being told, most specifically Rama.
Saint Omer was the first narrative feature film that Diop directed, and I’m not sure I would have automatically assumed that she’d come from the world of documentaries when watching this film. Sure, there is a search for some sort of emotional truth that ties the movie together, but at the same time, there’s a lot of precision to the way Diop shoots this thing. There’s an abundance of long shots with meticulously constructed dialogue, while the performances don’t feel particularly spontaneous or off-the-cuff. Yet the degree to which these characters act so emotionless and composed feels true to the way someone would act in court when trying to repress how awful the circumstances of their situation are.
There’s also this ambiguous headiness to the film that I wouldn’t necessarily equate with docs, though I can’t really say what kind of documentaries Diop has made, since I haven’t seen any of them. But the film does a nice job of giving you just enough insight into Rama’s life that we can project her feelings about motherhood onto Coly while also projecting our own as well. It’s a film that leaves you with plenty to chew on, even if the actual outcome of the trial is never particularly suspenseful. It’s also a film that perhaps would have cut a little bit deeper with me if I hadn’t already been watching a month’s worth of thought-provoking films, but even so, I’ll still remember the wood-paneled confines of that courtroom long after Criterion Month is over.