SAINT OMER (2022)

A strong, but difficult, debut from French/Senegalese writer/director Alice Diop, segueing from documentary to features in a fact-inspired tale of infanticide.  As I said, difficult; and less rare in France than you’d imagine.  Mostly set in the courtroom after a prologue that mercifully ellipses from the actual crime, a series of talking heads in various single or multiple compositions are led, in French legal fashion, by the female judge, as White as the people largely surrounding our two Black leads.  The murderer: a gentle looking, softly handsome young Senegalese/French woman, a former student of law & philosophy who’s admitted to the crime, but doesn’t know why it happened.  Her grasp of details malleable, changing between the start and the end of many responses.  Lies?  Doubt?  Unknowability?  The second lead a novelist, sitting thru the trial for research, elegant as a fashion model, crucially not Senegalese/French but French/Senegalese, and far more comfortable with the culture.  Newly pregnant, and having empathy attacks from the witness’s testimony.  What Diop does best comes thru inside that courtroom, in composition, relative angles and particularly in her use of the somber oaky colors that make the courtroom a sort of natural canvas for placing figures ‘just so.’  The writer’s darker-toned skin standing out against the court backdrop; the accused’s skin tone nearly the same shade as the walls, and dressed in clothes to match.  A woman who feels she has somehow disappeared seen disappearing into her settings.  Fascinating, if not without missteps.  Especially when Diop turns to MEDEA (via clips from the Pier Paolo Pasolini/Maria Callas film*), a story less relevant than Diop supposes; Medea utterly goal oriented.  Then, toward the end when out of the blue, Nina Simone comes on the soundtrack with Rodgers & Hart’s ‘Little Girl Blue.’  Nevertheless, impressive control on something as unique as it is tough-minded.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Pasolini’s MEDEA/’69, the only film from the controversy-seeking Italian to be better rather than worse than its reputation, presumably impressing Diop with its emphasis on Medea’s move from savage to civilized lands.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/medea-1969.html