The Questions of Saint Omer Can't Be Answered
“Some things, we can’t be sure about.”
Our minds launch into action when tragedies occur. An earthquake. A pandemic. A murder. We search for a cause, a meaning—an answer that fits neatly within our packaged understanding of the world. So we consider theodicy, wanting a purpose for the suffering we see each day. And we turn to documentaries of serial killers and true crime podcasts, looking for a satisfying psychological explanation. In this latter example, we are rarely satisfied in learning the identity of the killer. We’re always trying to get underneath that and understand the motive. (Perhaps even our desire for a glimpse of justice is subordinated under this longing for clarity.) In all these maneuvers, we try our damndest to fit the inexplicable in a box of tidy causation.
But some things we can’t be sure about.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer pushes us into this space with a story of a murdered child, a mother on trial, and a room filled with people but void of answers. We watch the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a Senegalese woman now living in France, who’s been charged with murdering her young daughter, Elise. The fifteen month old was abandoned, left to drown on a beach on the coast of France, only to wash back up on the shore and be discovered.
There is the first, most natural question: Who killed this child? And its attendant query: What really happened? But Diop cuts past those questions immediately. The facts of the case are laid out from the start. Coly was seen with Elise at a nearby hotel, returned without her daughter, and confessed to the murder. Coly agrees plainly to the facts of the case, providing no alibi nor wanting to. It leaves us and those involved in the trial with the much thornier question of why. Even Coly hopes that the trail will bring some sense of clarity to her actions.
As the judge and attorneys question Coly and those around her, the pieces slowly form an incomplete picture of her life. Born in Senegal, Coly describes a typical childhood of unremarkable happiness and challenge. Her mother was distant; her father closer, but with strong expectations for her life. As a young adult, Coly left those parental pressures for France, where she entered college and struggled to find a stable home. Coly eventually abandoned her studies and moved in with Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), an older, married man with an adult daughter of his own.
Coly describes years of loneliness with Dumontet, pushed to the side of his life and without other close ties. Her life became increasingly insular, even after Elise was born. Caught between cultures and pressured by the expectations of those around her, Coly hid from the world.
The trial is shown via medium shots that hold on a single character for minutes at a time. We watch Coly, in particular, for long stretches as she answers questions from the judge and various attorneys. Malanga is given a difficult task, subtly expressing the shift in Coly’s emotions across long dialogues. It’s a complex and skilled performance that portrays Coly’s strength and confusion.
The way Saint Omer depicts its trial forms a piercing counterpoint to the courtroom dramas we’re accustomed to. Gone are the close-ups on strained expressions or moments of emotional outburst. There are no twists or clever reveals. Saint Omer is much quieter and more formal, and for those reasons it’s sharper and truer to life.
As the trial continues, Diop explores hard questions of gender politics, racial prejudices, and concepts of motherhood. There are constant assumptions of motives from all corners. Interlocutors assume that Coly was either elated to become a mother or that she never wanted a child in the first place. A former instructor expresses confusion over why a Senegalese woman would ever want to study a German philosopher like Wittgenstein. And both the prosecuting attorney and the officer who interrogated Coly are inclined to think that she believes sorcery was involved.
Do any of these presumptions get anywhere close to reality? It’s doubtful. One of Saint Omer’s sharper aspects is the nuanced way it puts the “Western values” of the court on trial alongside Coly. This French courtroom, with its structure and rhetorical rhythm, doesn’t have the ability to answer all the questions it seeks. It raises questions of the way the court is arranged. How well can a philosophy of court built upon ideas from Western, mostly male thinkers drawing on particular notions derived from the Enlightenment untangle the motives and emotions that result in an unthinkable murder? That is an outsized difficulty no matter who is on the stand, but it requires a heightened arrogance when the court presumes that its methods apply equally well across lines of culture and gender.
But it’s more than just the court watching. Saint Omer is framed by the perspective of Rama (Kayije Kagama), an instructor and author who has centered her latest book on Coly’s case. Rama’s attention to Coly is distinctly different from that of the court, but she, too, is searching for understanding. As she unlocks pieces of Coly’s life, however, Rama is troubled by reverberations in her own life.
These reverberations form the thematic tether of Saint Omer. If Rama’s childhood shares similarities to Coly’s, does that imply that she also has the same capacity for cruelty within her? Rama’s empathy moves her toward Coly, but that very empathy frightens her. But as the movie unfolds, it’s evident that Rama is also a very different person than Coly. Yes, there are connections, but that doesn’t explain everything.
Can we ever understand a person’s motive? Saint Omer considers the possibility that we can’t. Assumptions of innocence and evil motive are all unconvincing in Coly’s case. Even empathy—perhaps a far better tool than the narrow logic of the court of law—can’t grant us full access to a person’s life, no matter how much we want it to. It’s a deeply existential dilemma, one that confronts both the court and Rama. And us.
We want courtroom dramas that offer catharsis, that answer our questions. We itch for understanding, and we seek stories that give us a glimpse of that. Art can give us stories but rarely reality. As beautiful as empathy can be, there remains a difference between seeing ourselves in others and truly seeing others. In the end, sometimes we can answer “only the easiest question,” never the deeper ones we hold within.
Saint Omer is a sharp film that manages to consider all sorts of questions. It depicts the particular shame women face in the midst of suffering and the lack of compassion we allot them. It explores the arrogance of Western systems that presume to have a far reach. It confronts us with our inability to understand another person. Ultimately, Saint Omer even considers the limits of art.
Perhaps, then, in the challenges confronting us, we should hold our understanding lightly. As Rama quotes from Marguerite Duras, we should allow each person to be “a human being in a state of grace.”
