Saint Omer

An observational French drama about a two women who are connected by motherhood and tragedy. It feels like the idea for a movie rather than a fully made one.

“Saint Omer” is a French legal drama about a crime that is unfathomable. Alas, it remains a mystery to me as well.

Co-written and directed by Alice Diop, who has heretofore only made documentaries, it feels more like the idea for a movie rather than a fully made one. It’s based on a real court case of a Senegalese immigrant woman who murdered her baby daughter by leaving her on the beach for the tide to drown her and carry out to sea.

Diop, whose family roots also lie in Senegal, personally attended the trial and was profoundly moved by the experience. That led to the creation of this film, where Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanga, both with little acting experience, play the stand-ins for Diop herself and the woman on trial.

Malanga plays Laurence Coly, who admits to killing her baby but insists she is not the responsible party. She spends the entirety of the movie on the witness stand, eliciting little sympathy with her conflicting accounts and affectless defection of blame to others. This includes the father, a feckless, much older Frenchman, and her jealous aunts back in Africa, whom she suggests employed sorcery against her.

Rama (Kagame) is an author and professor who decides to observe the trial to provide fodder for a potential book on Medea, the mythological figure who killed her own children. Four months pregnant herself, Rama is strangely drawn to Laurence — a reflection of her conflicted feelings about having a baby, which leads to flashbacks to her own childhood and a fractured relationship with her mother.

That’s a lot of rich, emotional material to mine.

Unfortunately, Diop and her co-writer, Amrita David — Zoé Galeron is also credited as a script consultant — seem content to rely on observation of the trial proceedings rather than drawing out full portraits of the characters. It’s just sketches, like a gestational precursor to an actual film.

Indeed, much of the movie is taken up simply with Rama watching Laurence as she testifies. Their eyes lock exactly once, though nothing of significance seems to pass between them.

Rama bumps into Laurence’s mother, also in the court audience, and they share a lunch without any breakthrough of information or empathy occurring.

We hear from the prosecutor (Robert Canterella), the defense attorney (Aurélia Petit) and especially the judge (Valérie Dréville), who in the French court system acts as the primary questioner. She seems sympathetic toward Laurence, repeatedly trying to draw out some kind of reason for the terrible crime she committed as if searching for a reason to mitigate the responsibility.

It is indeed a weird case. Laurence was essentially homeless when Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), a man about 30 years older than her, invited her to live with him in his studio apartment — despite the fact he remained married to his wife. Laurence, who takes great pride (borderig on hubris) in being well-spoken and educated, returned to her college studies for a time but became increasingly reclusive and paranoid.

She supposedly hid her pregnancy from everyone, even her partner (who must be the most unobservant man in the world). Laurence had the baby at home in secret, never registering its existence with the authorties. If the body hadn’t been found by a fisherman, it’s likely she never would have been arrested and charged.

The flashbacks to Rama’s childhood are curiously vague. We’re never sure exactly why she feels estranged from her mother. These sequences are exceedingly short and bereft of narrative information. It seems we’re supposed to get what we need from pregnant pauses and shared glances; I couldn’t.

“Saint Omer” is a movie hiding from itself. There’s a compelling story inside here somewhere, but we get the premise rather than the whole thing.

As a documentarian, Diop knows well the power of observation. But when it comes to narrative features, you have to actually make things happen. Too little does here.