'Saint Omer' is a riveting film about an immigrant mother who kills her own daughter
, a blistering drama about a young immigrant woman charged with murdering her infant daughter and the novelist who attends the trial with a plan to turn the tale into a book. Told primarily through testimonial dialogue from the accused, a judge and witnesses, it’s a morally complex affair defined by faces, expressions and words, at once unsparing and compassionate, sparse and subtly evocative.
Premiering at the New York Film Festival following critically hailed debuts at the Venice and Toronto fests—not to mention France’s entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Oscars—initially focuses on Rama , a Paris-born professor and writer whose parents are of Senegalese descent and who’s in a committed relationship with a Caucasian man named Adrian .
With a round face and eyes that veer from pained to enraged, Malanga is an arrestingly cagey center of attention. Once Laurence takes the stand, she’s interrogated by a judge and also, on intermittent occasions, by defense and prosecution attorneys.
Laurence’s narrative is one of abandonment, shame, displacement and loneliness, brought about first by her mother and then by Luc, whom she says hid her away out of humiliation and refused to accept paternity for their child. It’s a stirring account of mistreatment that, like the entire film, is laced with overt and covert racial and ethnic prejudices—the issue of the dark-skinned Laurence’s eloquence and decorum is a frequent, pointed subject—as well as domineering misogyny.