I might not have seen _Saint Omer_ if it weren't for Jessica
Kiang's review. One of the best younger critics, she seems to
focus on her festival director/whatever role these days; such
a loss.

Alice Diop's narrative debut is a cinematic tour de force. It
is based on the trial of a Senegal immigrant who killed her
daughter. The fictionalized Laurence (Guslagie Malana) once
dreamed of studying philosophy, doing a thesis on Wittgenstein.
But postgrad education is a loner's sport which has broken many
with more resources. She turned into a quasi-concubine of a
Frenchman twice her age who hid her from his family, while she
also became alienated from Senegal relatives. Further trapped
by her pregnancy, she barely left her studio, becoming invisible
to all. Viewers can draw their own analogy between Laurence
and present-day ghettoized French immigrants.

All these we learn from her lawyer (Aurelia Petit) during the
murder trial. Laurence is hardly helping her defense, opaque
even to herself, spinning poetic yarns about the moonlit night
she offered her child to the tide, yet incapable of introspection.
Here my ignorance of French law is a hindrance. Unlike in US
courts, both the lawyer and the judge try to understand her
action, humanize Laurence in spite of her aloofness, movingly
telling the jury the defendant learns everything about delivering
her own baby on the internet. They are poets in their own ways.
Diop references a scene from _Hiroshima Mon Amour_, arguing
that art turns our humiliation into a state-of-grace. The
woman defending Laurence in court do that with their eloquent,
empathetic closing statements, but wouldn't it be more powerful
if Laurence/Malana has that role? Instead the defendant blames
her crime on witchcraft, which makes an interesting cinematic
dialogue with _The Atlantics_ and is what her real life
inspiration did, but that hardly makes her compelling. Diop
makes other odd choices, notably obscuring our surrogate Rama
behind Laurence's sugar daddy during his self-serving testimony,
so we don't see her reactions. No one who takes the stand
emerges with credit; Laurence's mother is a chilly narcissist,
while her former professor wonder why a Senegalese would even
study Viennese philosophy. (Many critics single out that
testimony for its blatant racism. Yet they surely know that
"progressives" express similar segregationist views. The
respected actress Viola Davis recently, summarily dismissed
her Julliard education as too "European.")

It is Rama (a remarkable Kayile Kagame) who is the heart of the
film. She is literally a stand-in for the director (who attended
the real-life trial and took notes). With her Senegal roots and
a pregnancy she hides from her mother, she feels a kinship with
Laurence. There is also survivor's guilt in more ways than one.
Unlike Laurence, she has survived in academia, publishing acclaimed
books; her intellect and elegance fills her students, and us, with
awe. Yet this second generation immigrant also knows she could
have been Laurence's murdered child. Her own mother, whom we
come to know in awkward family gatherings, scarred by life in
France, might have been Laurence. The weight of that recognition,
which we infer from the actress' subtle work, triggers intense
re-examination of Rama's life, almost overwhelming her.

Kiang opines that the "flashbacks" would be too crude a term to
describe Rama's impressionist childhood scenes. Indeed these key
moments unfold in a parallel universe, like in Tarkovsky's films.
The courtroom long-takes, with majestic camera pans, likewise
remind me of Tarkovsky's "time sculpting." The lawyer's
passionate defense of the murderer, invoking the entirety of
her life, is reminiscent of fellow documentarian-turned-director
Kieslowski's "Dekalog V." Diop references Resnais and Antonioni
even more explicitly, via footage of _Hiroshima, mon Amour_
and the ghostly courtroom and emptied streets after the trial
has ended. Armond White cites another half dozen cinematic
references while Kiang likens the lighting to Rembrandt
paintings.

A technically immaculate film that evokes so many European
masters is clearly not meant to be a blanket condemnation
of Western culture, despite what some critics claim. Perhaps
only those with a colonial background like Diop are truly
comfortable highlighting the ambiguity: institutionalized
racism, of course, but also the promise of universal humanist
values (that transcend indigenous homophobia, ethnocentrism,
and worse). After all, philosophies like Confucianism thrived
because they helped prop up patriarchal authoritarianism, and
vice versa. When the defense lawyer argues that mother's and
daughter's DNA mingle, turning women into chimera-like
"monsters" (or gods, although she is too modest to claim that),
she may as well be talking about France and her colonies. In
casting Rama, whose long face and lean body look nothing like
her mother's, Laurence's, or even director Alice Diop, the
insinuation is that growing up in France has changed Senegalese
immigrants at a cellular level. The mutation alienates both
Rama and Laurence from their former tribe. Only one of them
survives the transition.

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