#SAINT OMER TRIAL#
When she and Adrien are asked what kind of remodeling job they’re planning on their home, it’s not quite clear how we know that Rama’s quick evasion signals simultaneously that it’s a baby room, that she is pregnant, and that she doesn’t want her family to know - but we do nonetheless.Īfter a brief discussion with her publisher, who gives his blessing to her project about a minor cause célèbre infanticide trial - one Rama intellectualizes as having resonance with the ancient Greek myth of Medea - she arrives in Saint Omer, and is seated in the courtroom when the defendant, Laurence Coly (a riveting Guslagie Malanda), takes her place on the stand. Already now, perhaps through the peculiar alchemy of Kagame’s superbly still and watchful performance, the tiniest flicker can provide volumes of information. Later, Rama and her partner Adrien (Thomas De Pourquery) visit her family for a dinner at which Rama’s strained relationship with her mother is evident. She speaks of the way the “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” screenwriter, through her art, could translate the state of shame conferred upon the shaven-headed “collaborator” women of World War II, into a state of grace. This courtroom drama begins in a university classroom, where Rama (Kayjie Kagame), a successful novelist, is lecturing on Marguerite Duras. From the eye of that storm of -isms and issues, where it’s eerily still, it’s the chattering judgements of the endlessly mediated world outside that feel dangerous, undisciplined, even crazy. Forged in the hypnotically absorbing, painterly long takes of Claire Mathon’s inscrutably calm camera, edited by Amrita David with an intimacy that feels at times like the slow thump of your heartbeat inside your own head, the film inhabits a shockingly strange and sad story from the inside. Review safety protocols before your visit.Instead, positioned on a mesmerizingly steady axis stretching, as though along a fascinated gaze, between the defendant and a courtroom observer based on Diop herself, “Saint Omer” challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity - and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). Multilayered and brilliantly acted, Saint Omer is both intensely psychological and observationally distant, a film about the impossibility of fully knowing another person and the estrangement of living in an adopted world.
Attending the trial is Rama (Kagame), a journalist also of Senegalese descent who plans to write a book about Laurence, comparing her to Medea, and who is dealing with her own anxieties around becoming a mother. Having admitted to the killing, she nevertheless refuses to admit motivation and denies that she’s to blame, saying she was affected by a curse.
The fiction feature debut by documentary filmmaker Diop ( We ) is an emotionally rich, thought-provoking courtroom drama that adapts the shocking true story of a young Senegalese immigrant named Laurence (Malanga) in northern France on trial for murdering her baby daughter. With Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly.
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