Saint Omer
But why exactly do we feel the need to do this? Director Alice Diop asked herself the same questions, and made the movie Saint Omer as an outlet. Diop, who has previously only made documentaries, was closely following the real-life court case of Fabienne Kabou back in 2016, in which Kabou was convicted of killing her daughter after she claimed that evil forces drove her to do it. Diop became obsessed and started attending the trial, saying that she "wanted to find answers to my own intimate questions that I had asked myself about my relationship with my own mother and being a mother myself. And I decided that since I shared those same emotions with so many women, if we were all so obsessed with that event, it meant there was something universal in the story, which had to do with motherhood. So I decided to make a film about it."
Saint Omer the movie shares many similarities to that real-life case. A novelist (Kayije Kagame) travels to Saint Omer, France to watch the trial of Laurence Coly (a terrific Guslagie Malanda) and write about the case. Coly is a Senegalese immigrant accused of leaving her 15-month-old daughter, the product of a complex mixed-race relationship with a much older man, on a beach to be swept away by the tide. She puts forward as her defense that she was subject to sorcery and spells from her aunts back in Senegal.
The movie is primarily one big courtroom scene, as the exasperated judge, lawyers and onlookers try and understand why she has killed her child (which she freely admits to doing). Coly is educated (a student of philosophy), clam and incredibly well-spoken throughout, all in sharp contrast with the senseless thing she's done and the reasons why she's claiming it happened. Her story seems to contain many lies and contradictions, even though (as she states) there doesn't seem to be any reason for her to not tell the truth. Other witnesses come forward offering evidence that appears to go against what Coly has just said, often right as you're starting to believe her. This cycle happens more than once.
Even though they are shot with little to no style or visual flourishes, the courtroom scenes are riveting and often charged with emotion. The secondary parts that follow Diop's stand-in novelist character don't work as well. The novelist is pregnant, and also an immigrant in a mixed-race relationship, so she certainly sees parts of herself in Coly. And maybe that's the larger point of the movie: we try desperately to understand the horrible actions taken by otherwise rational people and end up making connections to our own lives, whether it makes sense or not. At one point, the novelist's partner outright tells her that she is nothing like Coly and the case has nothing to do with her, which seems to give her some relief. But she has connected empathetically with Coly and NEEDS to understand why she did what she did, even if Coly can't properly explain it herself.
Maybe that's why some people get invested in true crime; even though the overall action or crime is something we'd never even consider doing ourselves, we still find bits and pieces of ourselves in the overall narrative and feel compelled to interrogate what that might mean. It's a movie with not a lot of answers, but a strangely compelling one that makes you question yourself, even if you're not entirely sure why.
