But throughout it all, the real connection that evolves is between Laurence and Rama, whose unreadable yet somehow vividly apparent reactions work time and again to dismantle our preconceptions as hers, too, undergo slow, lurching revolutions. Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit), whose spine-tingling summation is among the only whole-cloth inventions of the screenplay, co-written by Diop, Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye, and largely reworked from the transcripts of the actual trial. And she is occasionally redirected by her defense team, led by Ms. Her older, white, married lover - the father of the murdered baby - contributes his self-serving account of their relationship. Discrepancies in her story are spotlit by the prosecuting counsel (Robert Cantarella). She is questioned with brisk but not unsympathetic directness by the judge (Valérie Dréville). Within a woman this chillingly self-possessed, how would there be room? It’s hard to believe she was operating under the mystical influence of some evil-eye possession, and not just because of secular skepticism about curses and witchcraft. Lit by Mathon like a Rembrandt portrait in an ocher cardigan against the wood-paneled courtroom walls, and then left alone to occupy long, uninterrupted takes, Laurence gives her considered, lucid, utterly disingenuous testimony over the next few days. When she and Adrien are asked what kind of remodeling job they’re planning on their home, it’s not quite clear how we know that Rama’s quick evasion signals simultaneously that it’s a baby room, that she is pregnant, and that she doesn’t want her family to know - but we do nonetheless.Īfter a brief discussion with her publisher, who gives his blessing to her project about a minor cause célèbre infanticide trial - one Rama intellectualizes as having resonance with the ancient Greek myth of Medea - she arrives in Saint Omer, and is seated in the courtroom when the defendant, Laurence Coly (a riveting Guslagie Malanda), takes her place on the stand. Already now, perhaps through the peculiar alchemy of Kagame’s superbly still and watchful performance, the tiniest flicker can provide volumes of information. Later, Rama and her partner Adrien (Thomas De Pourquery) visit her family for a dinner at which Rama’s strained relationship with her mother is evident.

She speaks of the way the “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” screenwriter, through her art, could translate the state of shame conferred upon the shaven-headed “collaborator” women of World War II, into a state of grace.

This courtroom drama begins in a university classroom, where Rama (Kayjie Kagame), a successful novelist, is lecturing on Marguerite Duras. From the eye of that storm of -isms and issues, where it’s eerily still, it’s the chattering judgements of the endlessly mediated world outside that feel dangerous, undisciplined, even crazy. Forged in the hypnotically absorbing, painterly long takes of Claire Mathon’s inscrutably calm camera, edited by Amrita David with an intimacy that feels at times like the slow thump of your heartbeat inside your own head, the film inhabits a shockingly strange and sad story from the inside. Instead, positioned on a mesmerizingly steady axis stretching, as though along a fascinated gaze, between the defendant and a courtroom observer based on Diop herself, “Saint Omer” challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity - and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas.

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