Greek mythology tells that after Creon convinced Jason to marry his daughter, Medea, sick with jealousy, committed regicide killing both the king and the princess. Knowing that the Corinthians would set out in search of him and his offspring, he saw no choice but to kill his two sons to protect them and escape from there in his chariot drawn by winged serpents.
The myth has been told in many different ways, and even Pier Paolo Pasolini made it into a film in 1969. Now, lDocumentary director Alice Diop approaches her core in an innovative, difficult and unfriendly way but comforting in a certain way in ‘Saint Omer’, which has earned him the gold Giraldillo at the Seville Festival. In my case I must admit that it was not even remotely my favorite of the Official Selectionbut it’s not hard to see why the jury chose this film over ‘Close’, ‘Holy Spider’ or ‘My love affair with marriage’: a social dialogue that makes you think long after the room lights have gone out.
protest!
We have seen, at this point, hundreds of judicial films, both spectacularly made (‘The Trial of the Chicago Seven’), and more focused on the actors (‘Some Good Men’) or that even try to do justice with the past (‘Argentina, 1985’). ‘Saint Omer’ does not stand out in its visual invoice, of course: the trial is told from a cold, clinical point of view, one could even say boring, putting the viewer on the jury. But this is not a defect of the film: it is a conscious part of its staging and its proposal.
Diop denies her own brilliance as a director: what she wants is for the public to focus on the gestures, the responses, the visual responses of two women united by common experiences that connect them beyond the acts. On the one hand, Laurence Coly, a woman of Senegalese origin who acknowledges having killed her fifteen-month-old baby, letting the tide carry her away, and at the same time admits she is innocent. On the other, Rama, a novelist who wants to use the trial as a basis to write a new version of ‘Medea’ but feels how her own motherhood is affectedfeeling an unexpected symbiosis with Coly.
It is possible to fall into the error of believing that, given its documentary past, Diop falls into the falsehood of the genre without knowing how to tell a story, but it would be missing reality. The icy tone that the director uses is directly intertwined with those moments in which the eyes of both protagonists meet, a few seconds of audiovisual mastery that say more about the dark reflection, feeling invisible and empathy than hundreds of lines of dialogue at the same time. regard. Visual storytelling is much more powerful than it suggests at a glance.
Maternity discharge
In the end, ‘Saint Omer’ is as much a film about two women of color feeling like outsiders in a society that rejects them from the ground up (that general surprise with Coly’s upbringing) as it is about a maternity understood as a beginning and an end, as the most intense feeling that can be felt by a human being. So much so that the death of the little girl can be seen, within his coldness, not as an act of psychopathy, but of love.
Coly is an invisible woman: despite her skills, her human quality and her experiences, society and the elements inherent to it have condemned it to non-existence. Just like Medea, who knew that the Corinthians would go after her offspring, Coly is aware that France will not allow her daughter to have a different life from hers. As much as murder tries to dress up and disguise itself as witchcraft and madness, his conscious plea of innocence has so much power because, deep down, those responsible for his fall from grace are well aware of his share of relevance in this painful story.
Diop knows perfectly well that ‘Saint Omer’ is a film that not everyone will like, and that in an increasingly polarized sociopolitical climate, it is destined to receive criticism from those who make the effort to understand it. However, it is not easy: the film does not give anything fancy, nor does it pretend that you leave the cinema with clear ideas about it. Ask the viewer something unprecedented in these times: an exercise in reflection, internal debate and clarification of ideas. It is not a simple or kind work. On the contrary: it is arid, rocky and difficult to climb… And it is not necessarily a bad thing.
Full of awards
Nor do I want to make a mistake or raise it more than it should. ‘Saint Omer’ save a good handful of diamonds for all the viewer who wants to steel themselves and scratch at the surface, but doing so requires the work of overlooking the film’s biggest flaw: it’s deadly boring at times. And, of course, every movie doesn’t have to be a party, but it does have to be drowsy-inducing: the long scenes of the trial, in which what happened is repeated over and over again, they are pure wear and tear. So much so that when finding the hidden treasure behind them, one comes to wonder if the journey is worth it.
I think it deserves it, of course, not even to discover the fabulous role of its two protagonists: Guslagie Malanda, who has only been in two movies and one series (‘The Romanoffs’) in almost a decade, is an absolute discovery. A little more out of place is Kayijie Kagame, who falls a bit into overacting but manages to find that sweet spot without going overboard. Both performances manage to elevate the film and make it even more relevant. Her game of looks, her coldness against the heat, her similar and at the same time contrasting personalities, are enhanced by the presence of these two fabulous almost new actresses who carry the entire film on their shoulders.
‘Saint Omer’ has won in Venice, in Seville and is chosen by France to represent the country at the Oscars: the avalanche of awards makes it clear that it doesn’t matter that some of us we are not entirely convinced with Diop’s proposal. It is adult cinema, complex and that takes place over a very, very slow fire. Like the rising tide, like the pain of an invisible person, like a woman discovering that the fairy tale she imagined was just fiction.