Review: Saint Omer (2022) dir. Alice Diop

What is a mother’s life if not imprisonment dignified? Challenging to watch and even more so to morally evaluate, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022) vividly examines the tension between the horrific death of a child and the violent complexities of motherhood.

“I’m afraid I’ll be like her” says Rama, the novelist at the center of the film. She is pregnant, though keeping it secret. We assume she is referring to Laurence, a woman on trial for the irreconcilable crime of infanticide. When asked whom she means, Rama’s answer hangs poignantly in the air – the woman she fears becoming is her mom. Her words carry potent emotional depth accompanied by flashbacks in which a young Rama desperately tries to connect with her distant mother evidently struggling under cultural alienation and single parenthood. 

As a documentary filmmaker, Diop constructs a film  based on a true and personal encounter told with firm ambivalence. The film’s quiet stillness, archival footage, and overall lack of sensationalism make it especially bare and confronting. Through Rama’s identification with Laurence as a Senegalese woman with a complicated maternal relationship, the emotionality is not limited to the melodrama of a courtroom battle or true-crime special. Following a final plea from the prosecution, the camera lingers on each of the disparate faces of the surrounding white women. Their contemplative sympathy for Laurence stunningly translates Rama’s private relation to her as an immigrant woman to instead convey the oppressive universality of womanhood. The burden that unifies them is the world’s simultaneous idealization and condemnation of mothers; the supposedly dutiful privilege of bringing new life into a world in which women are treated with contempt at best, hatred at worst. Their suffering is generational; not their own, but passed on by all mothers before. A genetic pain that was destined for them before they were ever born.

The ending is purposefully ambiguous – Diop avoids falsifying linear morality. But the message is clear as Laurence stands, a martyr guilty of a terrible crime. Regardless of the verdict, she was always meant to serve a life sentence; that of motherhood which began the moment her little girl came into the world.