The latter similarly turns a violent real-life event into a taut elegy both movies follow young Senegalese women who migrate to France and then become unmoored. Saint Omer and La Noire de … (its English title is Black Girl) share some obvious parallels. But a film that’s never mentioned is arguably the one whose legacy looms largest: La Noire de …, Ousmane Sembène’s hour-long masterwork, released in 1966. The director nods to films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, layering in clips from each. As such, Rama is Diop’s-and the audience’s-closest analogue. The movie’s protagonist is a journalist and an author named Rama (played by Kayije Kagame), who is tasked with writing about the crime and its inscrutable culprit. Laurence’s monologues borrow directly from Kabou’s testimony, detailing the years she spent cloistered in her lover’s Paris studio and fearful of the outside world. Prior to the murder, Kabou, like the fictionalized Laurence, was a lapsed student, pregnant by a much older white man. The film focuses less on whether she committed this act and more on whether, because of her state of mind, she could reasonably be held accountable. In 2016, she attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who admitted to leaving her daughter to drown on a beach near the town of Saint-Omer. Read: The Good Nurse is a chilling murder mystery-and completely bloodlessĪ documentarian, Diop is largely faithful to the facts of the real case that inspired the film. In this narrative-fiction debut, the director Alice Diop understands that a restrained image can be more haunting than a graphic one. Saint Omer tells a true-crime story in an unusually quiet way, relying on long, slow camera shots and heavy pauses to deliver its emotional punches. Yet despite her muted appearance, Laurence (played by Guslagie Malanda) is forcefully captivating-much like the film itself, which collected top prizes at the Venice Film Festival and is shortlisted for an Oscar in the international-feature category. She doesn’t wear jewelry or any other adornments, and so, in scenes where she testifies, her attire and the matching wooden walls of the courtroom can seem to bleed into one another. For the first two days of her trial, at which she stands accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter, she wears a brown knit blouse on a later day, she wears a brown collared shirt. “Saint Omer” premieres in theaters January 13.Laurence Coly, the Senegalese immigrant at the center of the French courtroom drama Saint Omer, is dressed to be unnoticed. “With her first fiction feature, Diop lets real material speak with an ancient sadness, with hope offered in the form of Rama who keeps moving, carrying a burden of knowledge into the birth of a brave new life.” The questions it conjures are not the anticipated emotional ones, rather they challenge the audience, asking: what expectations do we carry about a person like Laurence? Do we want to believe that she is evil? Crazy? Is she the product of a ‘foreign’ culture? Is there someone else in her life that we could pin this on? Although technically a work of fiction, ‘Saint Omer’ is fiercely documentary-like in its concerns. “Not with her crime, but with the temporary insanity that afflicted a brilliant, marginalized Senegalese immigrant to Paris. “With ‘Saint Omer,’ Diop shows an equally unflinching gaze, yet while Capote examined his subjects with a clinical detachment, the filmmaker distinguishes herself here by daring to empathize with her own,” Sophie Monks Kaufman wrote in IndieWire’s review. ![]() “Saint Omer” is among IndieWire’s top films of the year, with the critic likening the feature to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” French Oscar Contender ‘Saint Omer’ Finds Director Alice Diop Making History: ‘I Want to Cry’
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