Instead, positioned on a fascinatingly stable axis that stretches, as if along a fascinated gaze, between the defendant and a courtroom observer based on Diop herself, “Saint Omer” challenges accepted ideas of perspective, subjectivity and objectivity, and even what cinema can do. to be when it is framed by an intelligence that does not accept those accepted ideas. Wrought into hypnotically absorbing, painterly long shots from Claire Mathon's inscrutably still camera, edited by Amrita David with an intimacy that at times feels like your heart's slow beating inside your own head, the film inhabits a surprisingly strange and compelling story. sad of the inside. From the eye of that storm of -isms and problems, where it is eerily still, it is the chattering judgments of the eternally mediatized outside world that feel dangerous, undisciplined, even insane.
This courtroom drama begins in a college classroom, where Rama (Kayjie Kagame), a successful novelist, is lecturing on Marguerite Duras. She talks about how the screenwriter of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, through her art, was able to translate the state of shame conferred on the shaved-headed “collaborator” women of World War II, into a state of grace. Later, Rama and her partner Adrien (Thomas De Pourquery) visit her family for a dinner where Rama's strained relationship with her mother becomes apparent. Already now, perhaps through the peculiar alchemy of Kagame's superbly still and watchful performance, the slightest blink of an eye can yield volumes of information. When she and Adrien are asked what kind of remodeling job they plan to do on their house, it's unclear how we know that Rama's quick evasion simultaneously indicates it's a baby room, that she's pregnant, and that she doesn't want her family. to know, but we know, nonetheless.
Director: Alice Diop
Writers: Amrita David, Alice Diop, Zoé Galeron
Stars: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville
After a brief discussion with her editor, who gives his blessing to her project on a minor causa célebre infanticide trial, one that Rama intellectualizes as having resonance with the ancient Greek myth of Medea, she arrives at Saint Omer and is seated in the courtroom as the defendant, Laurence Coly (a fascinating Guslagie Malanda), takes her place on the stand. Lit by Mathon like a portrait of Rembrandt in an ocher cardigan against the wood-paneled courtroom walls, and then left alone to occupy long, uninterrupted takes, Laurence gives his considered, lucid, and completely false testimony over the next few days. . It's hard to believe that she was operating under the mystical influence of some evil eye possession, and not just because of secular skepticism about curses and witchcraft. Inside a woman so chillingly in control of herself, how could there be space?
The judge (Valérie Dréville) questions her with forceful but not indifferent frankness. Discrepancies in her story are highlighted by the prosecutor (Robert Cantarella). Her older lover, white and married, the father of the murdered baby, contributes his egotistical account of her relationship. And she is occasionally redirected by her defense team, headed by Ms. Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), whose chilling summary is among the only complete fabrications of the script, co-written by Diop, Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye, and largely reworked to from the transcripts of the actual trial. But throughout it all, the real connection that plays out is between Laurence and Rama, whose unreadable yet somehow vividly apparent reactions work over and over again to dismantle our preconceptions, as hers also undergo slow, wobbly revolutions. . She grows up in Rama, also a black Senegalese French intellectual in a relationship with a white man, bearing a mixed-race child, an insistent, horrified identification.
Every once in a while, a moment in the trial indirectly gives a childhood memory of Rama and his mother. Presented calmly and crisply, these sequences are again almost eerily evocative. In one of them, her mother wordlessly washes the bowl she just used, places it along with a box of powdered chocolate milk in front of her little daughter, and leaves without once looking at her. The cold choreography of this routine, a mean act of barely adequate care, is a mini-rehearsal in alienated and mutually incomprehensible family relationships, as is a scene during a court recess, when Rama and Laurence's mother, Odile, who also attends the trial. , have lunch in a nearby cafe.
Watch Saint Omer 2022 Movie Trailer
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