'Saint Omer': multicultural France finds a great voice

2023-03-03T10:49:02.043Z

Alice Diop's first fictional film is a fascinating search for the lost African identity through the myth of Medea

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, a 2021 documentary by Alice Diop, the French director explored the cracks of multicultural France through her own biography, specifically, the distorted image of the mother figure, a symbol of uprooting and African roots.

A source of pain and mystery expressed through the traces of home videos through which the desires of the children of migration slip through.

Two years after his last documentary, Diop's first fiction film is released, the fascinating

Saint Omer,

which delves into that same wound through a true story: the trial against a mother of Senegalese origin that ended the life of her 15-month-old daughter abandoning her on a moonlit night on a beach in Calais.

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The real story happened in 2016 when Fabienne Kabou let her daughter drown on the beach of Berck-Sur-Mar.

Diop attended the trial as an auditor and with the transcript of the sessions in hand, he prepared a signed script together with the French-Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye, winner of the Goncourt Prize in 2009 with Three Strong Women and co-writer of the Claire Denis film A Woman

Africa

and his collaborator and regular editor, Amrita David.

Although Diop has been filming on the fringes of the

banlieue for years,

her first fiction has catapulted her directly onto the world cinema highway.

Saint Omer

won the Silver Lion and the award for best debut in Venice and just a week ago the César for the best debut feature of the year.

Despite being an arid film, with a formal rigor that at times exhausts, its strength drags, especially when the trial arrives, which we witness through the gaze of a teacher and writer, also of Senegalese origin, who is pregnant .

Played by Kayije Kagame, her character functions as the

on-screen

alter ego of the director, a Janet Malcolm-esque author seeking her own Medea myth in the process.

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But the object of his gaze, and all other gazes, is the defendant, in the shoes of a sensational Guslagie Malanda.

All the interventions of her character, a cultured young woman whose lucidity becomes a surprise factor, are magnetic.

She hieratic, with her skin and her clothes fused to the noble wood of the room, she talks about her upbringing, immigration, her mother and the night she left her daughter to die. her with a dignity that prevents judging her.

Saint Omer

is an exploration of African identity in exile that dissects, as a tragic symbol of uprooting, the reckoning between mother and son.

A feeling that shines through in many moments, but above all in a revealing sequence in which the writer who is a witness to the trial refuses to tell her own mother that she is pregnant.

It's a refusal gesture that she will hover over the entire movie.

As if the character refused to admit the power of an umbilical cord marked by the conflicting legacy of those who left their land in search of something better.

Although the most unforgettable moment of the entire film is the slight gesture, charged with emotion, that the accused dedicates to the chronicler from the stand.

They are the only two black women in the room and the bond of their roots, of distant mother Africa, automatically shines in an overwhelming way.