What she is confronted with are inconsistencies in her own telling. Laurence describes isolation, confusion, lostness. And in the gap between those frames, Saint Omer suggests, a world of understanding is lost.
Barques saint omer trial#
The trial becomes an occasion to weigh Laurence’s truth against what it considers to be the truth. The faces she offers us throughout - of the judges, the lawyers, Laurence, Rama, Laurence’s mother, the jury (none of them Black) and the other guests in the court (most of them white) - amplify the sense of examination. Diop slowly builds the brick house of Laurence’s personal narrative up only to give us a court that will systematically tease it apart. Diop’s camera is intently focused on faces - particularly Rama’s, who is so in keyed into these proceedings that moments arrive in which the sound of the court proceeding dims and the audio zeroes in on the taut rhythm of her breathing. It’s like watching this story in double vision. Top Trump Adviser Pushed for Drone Strikes on Migrants, New Book Claims How can a woman who speaks educated French, who arrived to study philosophy, who therefore seems willing to agree to and perform Western values, still believe that she has been cursed? Why - a representative from her school asks - would a Black woman study Wittgenstein? How can a woman claim to love a child but hide that child, and the fact of her pregnancy, from everyone around her? You can feel the fractures in this already. And about her sense - on which it seems that this trial will hinge - that she has more or less been cursed. She tells us about her conception of her child.
We hear of her loneliness while studying philosophy, and of the path that landed her in the studio of an older man with a family who never grew to treat her like family, let alone an equal. From Laurence, during the trial, we hear the story of a childhood that was relatively privileged, of parents whose affections were not always felt, and a mother in particular (who attends the trial) whose emphasis on European politesse and success demanded that young Laurence abandon Wolof and other cultural ties to their home in Dakar. The script, co-written with Amrita David, packs entire felt histories into the sparest of monologues.
“I hope that this trial will give me the answer.” Early on, she is asked why she killed her daughter. She says that she does not think she is the responsible party in this crime. But when she is asked for her plea, she pleads not guilty. She does not deny doing this she will testify to all of it. Coly has been charged with leaving that child on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer, during a high tide.
Her story is that she fell in with an older French man, named Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), and entered into a dispiriting romance that would only result in more isolation. Instead she found a country whose difficulties only inspired in her a grave sense of isolation and anger. The woman on trial, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), is a native of Senegal who came to France to study philosophy.
Barques saint omer full#
How it is that a court full of people who’ve not only deemed you a monster, but also an “other” - an outlier to their way of life - may arrive at that understanding, or not. It sets before us what is at first glance an inarguable evil - the murder of a child - and asks us to confront, not only what we do not understand, but the terms of that understanding.
Barques saint omer movie#
It is a movie about language and testimony, mothers and daughters, and the specific burden of a Black immigrant woman who finds herself subjected to the French legal gaze. Far more complex, the movie finds, is the problem of how we should feel about the moral authority of the question - and the moral authority of the domain in which it can be asked. But it is not strictly concerned with the question of innocence or guilt as a problem of the law. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a movie about a trial.
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