Saint omer9/4/2023 ![]() Without a home or money, Coly moved in with her much older lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly). She changed her field from law to philosophy – a decision that her father didn’t approve of and led him to stop supporting her financially. When she grew older, Coly escaped to France but only ran into more problems. This cut her off from making friends and finding community. However, as the case proceeds, Mathon begins to implement sudden shifts in perspective where a slight variation in facial expression or body language or an exchange of glances has the power to drastically change how we see Coly and her reasons for committing the crime.Īs Coly gives her testimony, we learn that her mother, Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), pressured her as a child to be the ideal Frenchwoman and did not allow her to speak Wolof, her native language. ![]() On the first day of the trial, Mathon shoots Coly straightforwardly, isolating her in a mid shot as she stands statically looking left to the judge offscreen. Likewise, cinematographer Claire Mathon takes a measured approach. Diop shoots Petit in an extended close-up, highlighting the visceral nature of her appeal to female solidarity. Take the closing statement of Coly’s attorney, Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), as she asks the court for empathy towards her defendant. Some may dismiss this style as artless, but it’s evident that each sequence is carefully crafted. As a solely documentary filmmaker up to this point, Diop deliberately chooses to observe the performers in her direction, allowing room for the narrative to challenge our projections of the characters. While the details of the trial sound like a sensational true-crime Netflix drama, Diop captures the events with a notable amount of humanity, asking us whether she deserves empathy. There existed something universal about her difficult experience with motherhood where all sorts of barriers were placed in front of her – racial and socioeconomic – that made a tragic story inevitable. Diop explained that she decided to make a film about Kabou when she observed how all the women court attendees were visibly moved by the case. As the trial progresses, it focuses less on the woman in question and more about the burden society puts on mothers and Black women in particular. Despite Coly’s perplexingly enigmatic nature, Rama recognizes parts of the woman’s story that are present in her own, including living as a Black woman in France, a strained relationship with her mother and fears about becoming a mother herself. While on the stand, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), the fictionalized version of Kabou in the film, confesses to the crime but pleads not guilty, citing “sorcery” as the cause of her incomprehensible actions. Rama attends the trial, attempting to write a book that fits the Greek myth of Medea into the case. ![]() Saint Omer sees the infamous, real-life 2016 case of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese-French woman who left her 15-month-old child to drown at a beach in Berck-sur-Mer, in this same way. Duras’ work examines female characters who have committed deplorable acts, but she doesn’t judge, instead recognizing their complex place as both wrongdoers and victims whose stories deserve to be heard. Saint Omer begins at a university where Rama (Kayjie Kagame) lectures on Marguerite Duras and her screenplay to the 1959 romantic drama film Hiroshima mon amour.
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