Saint Omer (2022), dir. Alice Diop. Friday, January 13 at the AMC Southdale.

The AMC Southdale is a pretty depressing place. Sparsely attended, on the edge of a dying mall (aren’t they all dying?) and selling popcorn that you can coat with what seems like liquid hand lotion, the place still holds many fond memories for me, but it sure brings me down. So I guess it’s apropos to see a movie about the trial of a woman who killed her baby.

Sadly, the movie is based on a true story, the real-life trial attended by the director, Alice Diop. Diop was about to become a mother herself, and was fascinated by this story of a woman, an African immigrant to France, who walked to the edge of the sea and left her baby where she knew the tide would come in. The baby drowned. This is a cinematic reenactment of the trial.

Saint Omer is a very solid film, a bit ambiguous for my taste, but worth watching–it’s totally compelling, and the two leads are mesmerizing. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a stand-in for Diop, who observes the trial; Guslagie Malanda is Laurence Coly, the Senegalese woman who came to France to study (she’s brilliant) and killed her child. She claims any number of defenses and one of those defenses is witchcraft. She states that she hopes that the trial will also give her answers.

One of the crazy things about this movie is its depiction of French courts. If this film is correct–and The New Yorker’s Richard Brody claims it is (I’ll trust him)–well, then the judge in any given trial gets to ask question after question of defendant and witnesses, acting as a sort of lawyer for both sides. When she turns the questioning over to either lawyer, here, at least, they rage at the defendant or the witnesses, making damning statements against them before signing off with “no more questions”. Seriously, I don’t think either lawyer ever asks a question that isn’t simply a preamble to an attack on their character.