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Alice Diop’s Saint Omer brings the French filmmaker into the realm of fiction for the first time, but preserves her documentary respect for the evidence of the audience’s eyes. A sober, pared-down courtroom drama, Saint Omer initially makes little effort to comment on its action, at times feeling more like presentation than representation. The unadorned quality of the film can be laborious, particularly in the early stretches of the trial that’s at the center of the story, but Diop earns the effort she asks of her audience, methodically allowing a strange, intangible, but nevertheless palpable mix of emotions to emerge from the situation itself.

It’s certainly a choice, and the expression of an ethos, that Diop keeps the viewer locked in to repeating pairs of alternating camera angles for significant portions of the trial. We see the defendant, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant and...

Saint Omer Review — Saint Omer (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Alice Diop, written by Amrita David and Alice Diop and starring Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Xavier Maly, Thomas de Pourquery, Salimata Kamate, Robert Cantarella, Aurelia Petit and Louise Lemoine Torres. Alice Diop’s heavy but absorbing dramatic French film, Saint Omer, is certainly [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Saint Omer (2022): Filmmaker Alice Diop’s Courtroom Drama is Captivating and Marvelously Acted...

In 2016, in the courtroom of Saint-Omer, a small, untouristed town off a D-road between Calais and Lille, the trial took place of a young Senegalese Frenchwoman accused of murdering her baby: an act so utterly antithetical to accepted ideas of motherhood and womanhood that it is inescapably considered the “worst of all possible crimes.” The woman, a PhD student with a reported genius Iq and a flair for flamboyantly intellectual French, confessed but claimed sorcery as the real culprit. It’s the kind of true story that presents an obvious opportunity for a sensitive social drama given to sober, sorrowfully objective observations about the perilous, tumbling vortex of class, gender, ethnic and cultural issues in which it plays out. “Saint Omer,” the deceptively austere, extraordinarily multifaceted fiction debut from documentarian Alice Diop, is not that film.

Instead, positioned on a mesmerizingly steady axis stretching, as though along a fascinated gaze,...

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The details of the case are grim. On a chilly November day in 2013, Fabienne Kanou surrendered her 15-month-old daughter, Adélaïde, to the sea. She chose the shores of Berck-sur-Mer because of its linguistic proximity to impurity: “Berck” sounded like “Beurk,” the French word for “yuck.”

Later, when asked by police for her motive, Kanou replied cryptically, “It was simpler that way.” During her trial in 2016, she attributed her actions to malevolent forces. Nothing in her story made sense, she said. “Even a stupid person would not do what I did.”

Kanou’s case enraptured France for its peculiarity and harshness. The woman was a graduate student with a genius level Iq. White media outlets chronicling the trial liked to note her eloquence; they could not, it seems, reconcile Kanou’s race and rhetorical prowess, her calm presentation and horrifying action. Alice Diop’s...