On Hulu, I watched the 2022 French legal drama Saint Omer, directed by Alice Diop and starring Kayjie Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. It's a legal drama centering around Afro-French women, and heavily based on a 2016 true crime case in France where Fabienne Kabou was convicted of killing her infant daughter in 2013, and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. Diop attended the trial while pregnant, and since she couldn't bring cameras in to create a documentary about the case, she made a narrative drama instead, which was a big award winner at the Venice Film Festival, as well as a big winner and nominee at several other international film festivals.
Rama (Kagame) is a literature professor and novelist in Paris, who is attending a trial in Saint-Omer to write a novel presenting the case as a modern-day retelling of the Greek myth of Medea, a wronged woman who murdered her children to make a statement to her partner and the world. The trial is for Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman who has admitted to have murdered her 15-month old daughter, Elise (aka Lili), and speaks broadly about having come from a comfortable but lonely childhood in Dakar, having complicated relationships with her parents, feeling isolated in Paris as a student and live-in nanny, and having her child with a much older man who kept her a secret from others (likely due to him being an old white man with a young Black girlfriend from an African nation), then keeping her pregnancy and child a secret from everyone, including her family, not registering her child's birth and later leaving her alone at night on a beach to be drowned at the shore, assuming her body would just be carried out to sea.
Laurence is not remorseful about the crime, but rather presents herself as a lonely woman struggling with isolation and being cut off by her family after she chose to study philosophy instead of law, and alleges that her actions were led by sorcery and not her own volition. Her statements are countered by the prosecution, noting her vague answers to dodge questions, and her much older lover, who tries to play the innocent frail old man but is called out for denying his role as the child's father and refusing to acknowledge his relationship with Laurence in public.
Rama herself is pregnant, and has had her own complicated history with her Senegalese mother, and both connects with the African French woman and cries in her hotel room, afraid that she will have mental issues like her mother and repeat the cycle to her child. Rama largely is the observer in this film, as much of the story is on Laurence on the stand giving her testimony, adding in dramatic flourishes like walking "by the moon at night on the beach, like it shined a path for me." Rama is later contacted by Laurence's mother, and the two of them have a thoughtful and meaningful moment together in a diner, not speaking much but connecting on Senegalese women in Paris and motherhood.
I really liked this film. It felt different to watch a French legal drama, and I don't know how much is accurate in the French legal system depicted vs. reality, but it felt really interesting to watch, and I did like how the film gave a three-dimensional portrait of a woman who committed a horrible crime, as well as Rama being Diop's stand-in for observing the trial and having her own personal feelings with it and her own life. I agree with Manohla Dargis, the New York Times film critic, who wrote "the story explores motherhood, race, and postcolonial France with control, lucidity, and compassion." The film was largely quiet, a two-hour drama that felt more quiet and contemplative, and was very engaging and engrossing to get into it, I'm glad I watched it.
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