Saint Omer

I generally like the style of French courtroom dramas. They lack the stuffy formality of the more typical judicial scenarios and are generally much more combative. This one isn’t so much about the crime, but more about our appreciation and perhaps forgiveness of it’s causes. Senegalese arrival in France “Laurence” (Gustalgie Malanda) is on trial for a murder we know she committed. She took her newborn baby and left it on the beach at high tide whereupon it duly drowned. She’s perfectly open about that but claims that she was the victim of sorcery, perhaps emanating from the spirits in her homeland, and that she had little memory or consciousness of the deed. This case is being observed by a writer, “Rama” (Kayije Kagame), who is also having issues around a pregnancy of her own and that serves as a parallel story of an immigrant with a native French boyfriend, a traditional mother and anxieties that mount as she follows more of this investigation. Is “Laurence” a manipulative and devious murderer who never wanted the child, or is she mentally ill and innocent of culpability in her daughter’s death? It’s a slow burn this drama but at times there is a lot of fairly intense and thought-provoking dialogue that asks questions of superstition, isolation, loneliness and also of the responsibilities of parenthood as this woman gives evidence. The infant’s father, the older and married “Dumontet” (Xavier Maly), was unaware of the pregnancy and so it also highlights the dwindling role of the father in the whole childbearing process. He is accused of cowardice and neglect of this woman, yet what opportunity was he given by her, or the law, to impose himself on a situation being controlled by a person allegedly not capable of rational thought? His impotence is writ large. It is maybe a little longer than it needed to be, but it’s provocative and it doesn’t offer us any simple or trite answers to some fairly fundamental and controversial challenges.