Saint Omer: Shades of Motherhood

In Saint Omer, Rama’s mother represents the stories of many women of African descent who were not given the opportunity to make choices—whether to come to France, to get married, to have children. They bore the weight of lives in which they were never asked about their health or happiness. No longer women with childhoods and memories, they were simply mothers.

For much of the film, Rama denies her pregnancy. Coly’s story haunts her to the point that she questions her capacity to be a mother. When her partner asks what she’s afraid of, she replies, “To be like her”—her mother. She recalls feeling invisible as a child and not receiving the love she deserved, and Coly’s story leads her to wonder if she or her cold, distant mother could commit the same act.

Rama’s mother appears in the film at various times, in both flashbacks and the present day. One moment during a contemporary family lunch has stayed in my mind, when one of Rama’s sisters asks her if she can accompany their mother to a doctor’s appointment, and Rama tells them she is too busy with work—attending the trial. Rama’s mother stands up and leaves the table with the desperation of a mother who feels her children are not being supportive enough. The mother says few words; she speaks mostly through her silence, demonstrating how exhausted she is. This comes across especially poignantly in a flashback of mother and daughter in the kitchen early in the morning, mother mechanically finishing her milk and rinsing the bowl, and young Rama taking the same one for her breakfast. No good mornings, no goodbyes—Rama sees the door closing, without one look from her mother. Every detail of this scene shows how her mother suffers but has never been able to convey with words the love, unhappiness, and discomfort she experienced.

Laurence Coly’s mother is not so different. Although, as we learn in the trial, she spoke to her daughter every week, she was unaware of her pregnancy. During the proceedings, the mother learns about a new side of her daughter, who recounts that her mother was “obsessed” with her education and wanted her to succeed in life. She describes her father, on the other hand, as “sensitive and very cultured,” sharing with her a taste for the arts. But her relationship with her mother is more charged. She highlights her mother’s absence, and the fact that she worked a lot and was “always tired.” We see Coly’s mother in the courtroom with her head down.

Diop cowrote Saint Omer with her longtime collaborator Amrita David, who also edited the film, and Marie NDiaye, an acclaimed novelist, whose 2009 Three Strong Women—the first book by a Black woman to win the Prix Goncourt—has clear resonances with the story of Saint Omer. Fiction and documentary blend here and share the goal of telling the truth. As legendary French filmmaker Euzhan Palcy has pointed out, fiction can expand the imagination and extend what a character can do in real life.

As a doctoral student in visual sociology, Diop became particularly influenced by Jean Rouch and Éliane de Latour, whose work helped her realize the potential of cinema to examine political and social issues with sensitivity, and with an aesthetic sensibility. She decided to follow that model, and she started with what she knew best: the Cité des 3000, the famous urban project of Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, where Diop lived for the first ten years of her life. With the resulting movie, La tour du monde (2005), she aimed to change our gaze by giving another narrative to the French banlieues and their residents. Her obsession with multiple points of view has permeated her entire filmography.

During her early years as a filmmaker, the French media tried to reduce her work to a cinéma de banlieue, insinuating that she could only speak for it, and nothing else. Despite herself, Diop has become a symbol of success in France, proof of the so-called meritocracy the country loves to tout to argue that colonialism, racism, and xenophobia do not impact a person’s ability to get ahead. But, of course, racism and misogynoir do still exist, even for those who do succeed, like Diop. Perhaps this explains why she was only recently widely recognized, despite her twenty-year career. She has mentioned being born into the public’s attention on September 10, 2022, the day she received multiple accolades for Saint Omer at the Venice Film Festival, including the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and the Lion of the Future “Luigi De Laurentiis” award for best first feature. Standing next to jury president Julianne Moore, the director recalled the powerful words of Audre Lorde, who wrote, “Our silence won’t protect us.” Diop declared her refusal to remain silent any longer. Saint Omer is all about this—the capacity to transform silence into something concrete.

The film encapsulates the feeling of transformation. It breathes, thanks in large part to Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, one of only two pieces of music we hear. Diop initially considered using portions of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach but was introduced to Shaw’s music by Thomas de Pourquery, who plays Rama’s partner, and soon opted for Partita, which, like Glass’s work, conveys a sense of anxiety and sadness but does so using breathing sounds in a more feminine manner. Shaw’s vocal composition arrives at times when Rama is distressed—by her memories, by her pregnancy, by the trial. We read her mind and feelings through Partita’s rhythm, which often recalls a woman in labor or a chorus of women in pain.

The second piece of music, played at the end, is Nina Simone’s soothing “Little Girl Blue,” which accompanies Rama’s newfound serenity about her pregnancy and her relationship with her mother. Each piece arrives at the right moment, following the story without manipulating our emotions, but rather acknowledging what we already perceived.

But the film’s main score is the sound of silence, illustrating what we feel but cannot express. Coly hopes the trial will help her to understand her act, to find the voice to explain herself—a rare opportunity to say her part without others projecting onto her. In the film, her eyes and expressions often speak volumes, even as she remains silent. Her lines are heavy, sometimes delivered in long sentences, in front of an audience there to judge her. Malanda’s preparation for her astonishing portrayal included tai-chi training that focused on breathing techniques. She has remarked that breathing was vital to her performance, helping her stay calm and steady while fighting the psychological pain of playing this part.

Diop has compared Shaw’s music to Greek tragedy, a connection that echoes the film’s Medea theme. The whole film is a patchwork of cultural references that have influenced the director, including Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical work on language, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea. She allows herself to be a combination of everything that has forged her, unconcerned with any potential accusations of cultural inauthenticity or betrayal of her community.

Laurence Coly, like Fabienne Kabou, speaks in an elite French dialect, which shocks many in the predominantly white courtroom. Some critics and audiences might also question how she attained this eloquence and knowledge of philosophy. How Rama, a writer, scholar, and thinker, can give a lecture at such a prestigious French institution as Sciences Po. How Alice Diop, a Black female filmmaker, is able to incorporate such a wide variety of sharp cultural references into her work. Unfortunately, society and the legal system frequently refuse to recognize women, like Coly, who do not conform to stereotypes. They lack understanding of exile, mental illness, loneliness, and mysticism, especially when connected to the particular dynamics of a cultural background other than their own. Every aspect of Saint Omer conveys ambiguity, forcing viewers to confront their projections and misconceptions, and thereby prompting introspection.

The staging of the trial focuses the camera on the characters’ faces and expressions, allowing us to imagine their emotions. Director of photography Claire Mathon paints exquisite portraits of the protagonists. Diop and Mathon have cited various inspirations, most prominently Andrew Wyeth’s painting Grape Wine—depicting Willard Snowden, a Black man who lived in the artist’s studio for several years—which, with its yellow-brown ombré that creates an atmosphere of warmth, served as a central reference for countering the coldness of the courtroom venue. Other references included Rembrandt’s shading; Black models painted by Paul Cézanne; La belle ferronnière, by Leonardo da Vinci; and the work of photographer Harry Gruyaert.

The courtroom—a place of lies, pretense, and judgment—provided the perfect setting for Diop to examine issues of race, power, and motherhood, and never has a courtroom film delved so deeply into these topics. Actress Aurélia Petit’s performance of the defense attorney’s closing argument, based on the actual Kabou trial record, is breathtaking. The final moment of the film captures the mutual gaze between the two primary characters, subliming their connection. The film was never about Kabou/Coly’s sentence—this is why the verdict is not disclosed at the end. It has always been about showing her humanity, as anyone deserves.