To nourish her new novel, a contemporary version of the myth of Medea, Rama, a young writer and professor of literature, undertakes to attend the trial of Laurence Coly, an infanticidal mother who appears at the Saint-Omer assizes, in Pas-de-Calais. . One autumn evening, this woman, of Senegalese origin, abandoned her 15-month-old daughter to the waves in Berck-sur-Mer. Over the course of the hearings, the accused reveals a personality enigmatic under the fascinated gaze of Rama, also black and pregnant.
Nuances and gaps
To the president of the court, who asks her if she knows why she killed her daughter, Laurence Coly, straight gaze and atonal voice, calmly responds: “I hope this trial can teach me that.“It is the whole point of this closed judicial session, dry and oppressive, to try to apprehend, behind the opacity of this murderous mother, the invisible threads which led to this appalling news item. Ruined ambitions, exile , irresponsible companion thirty years his senior, solitary self-effacement and hallucinations… In the courtroom saturated with woodwork resonate, suspended, the scraps of life of an intelligent woman, unloved and forgotten by precariousness, who slips into the general blindness, towards madness: a dotted path on which floats the vagueness of latent racism and a dead colonial history, when the press in particular is surprised by the high verbal precision of the accused But rather than. to denounce a social drama, Saint Omer unfolds the legal process to explore, in infinite nuances and gaps, the mystery of this unfathomable figure at the same time as that of motherhood. Inspired by the Fabienne Kabou affair, convicted for infanticide during a trial in which Alice Diop (We) had attended, the filmmaker’s first feature-length fiction film plunges into the abyss of tragic human complexity to better question the part of monstrosity in everyone. Multi-awarded and served by formidable actresses – Guslagie Malanda, Kayije Kagame and Valérie Dréville… –, a powerful political film with universal reach.
Related News :