In the 2022 French film Saint Omer, a writer and professor, Rama, attends the trial of a student accused of murder. This courtroom showcases a tragedy worthy of Euripides: the archetypal unforgiveable act of infanticide. Before the trial begins, Laurence Coly has already confessed to killing her 15-month-old daughter. Despite being in the courtroom only as an observer, the writer is clearly wracked by Coly’s story.

So it is not surprising that we watch Rama’s lectures with an eye toward the courtroom drama with which she is increasingly fascinated. For her students, Rama screens archival footage of l’épuration, or the post–World War II purge in 1944-45: when French women who were reputed to have collaborated—by taking Vichy or German lovers—forcibly had their heads shaved. Meanwhile, Saint Omer’s camera fixes on individual students reacting to that symbolic shaming. At the same time, Rama reads lines from Marguerite Duras’s script for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), stating that “a woman who is the object of shame becomes,” thanks to the writer’s words, not just a heroine but “a subject in a state of grace.”

Remarkably, Saint Omer originated in a true-crime tale, that of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of killing her own 15-month-old daughter, Adélaïde. Attending Kabou’s trial with bated breath was Alice Diop, the director. Up to this point, Diop had only made documentary films, like Nous (We, 2020), which follows everyday people living along the RER B train, or La permanence (On call, 2016), about a doctor working in a refugee medical center outside Paris. But Diop, who was pregnant at the time of the trial—much like her character Rama—became enthralled with Kabou’s story: “I went there under the magnetic pull of an obsession,” she later explained, “that for a long time I couldn’t put into words.”

This review focuses on two films, Diop’s and French director Justine Triet’s acclaimed feature-length Anatomy of a Fall, which showcase the revival of the French courtroom drama, how it sheds light on the French legal system today, and how it pursues perennial questions surrounding the moral expectations associated with motherhood.

Courtroom dramas and crime procedurals are staples of American cinema and television. But the French artistic canon mostly lacks a comparable subgenre. Instead, French artists really adore a good fait divers—a “tabloid headliner”—as in Claude Chabrol’s neo-noir Violette Nozière (1978), based on a real-life teenage sex worker who poisoned her parents.

In 2023, Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall was the talk of the festival circuit. Winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (which Triet coauthored with Arthur Harari), the film depicts a woman—both a writer and a mother—on trial for her husband’s murder, after he fell to his death under questionable circumstances. A portrait of a fractured marriage, the film weaves professional jealousy with the overwhelming responsibility of caring for a blind son. In addition, it features drawn-out evidentiary proceedings during which covertly recorded audio and, amazingly, a dog come into play. Arguably, Anatomy revived the long-stale genre of the courtroom drama.

But in so doing, Anatomy also overshadowed another film that came out the year prior: Diop’s Saint Omer (2022). Despite winning the César for Best Film and the Jean Vigo Prize, among others, Saint Omer did not attract as wide of an audience.

Yet both films portray immigrant women—a Senegalese woman in the French commune of Saint-Omer and a German woman in Grenoble—who are similarly lost within an unfamiliar French legal system. And both films introduce international audiences to the particularities of French criminal law, such as the fact that it lacks admissibility requirements around “hearsay,” meaning that eyewitness testimony can be more expansive (and speculative) than in the US.

And ultimately, both films linger over protagonists who, when faced with factual and/or circumstantial evidence, are forced to justify their own selfishness: to explain why they are bad mothers rather than how they committed the crimes. Why did Laurence confine her daughter to her room, hiding the baby’s existence from her own family and denying the child the pleasures of the outside world? Why did Sandra, Anatomy’s protagonist, consistently choose her career as a novelist over her family, leaving her husband with the bulk of the childcare and little time to write himself? Why did Sandra commit adultery and dabble in bisexuality—other supposed “signs” of her bad character?

It is telling that neither film hands down a verdict. In both cases, we are meant to identify with the defendants—albeit for different reasons. These are stories not of motherhood but of humanity; as Laurence’s lawyer intones, “we are all monsters. But terribly human monsters.”

Saint Omer was shot in six weeks between May and July of 2021. The screenplay—cowritten by Diop, the film editor Amrita David, and the novelist Marie NDiaye—resembles NDiaye’s own novel Vengeance Is Mine, published the same year (and later translated by Jordan Stump). Still, there are notable differences, beginning with the act itself.

In the film, Diop’s protagonist, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), passively leaves her daughter on the beach, where she will be swept away by the waves and drown. But the novel’s character, Marlyne Principaux, forcibly drowns her three children in the bath (recalling another infamous criminal mom, the American Andrea Yates, who confessed to drowning her five children in 2001 and was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006). Principaux’s story, however, is narrated from the perspective of her lawyer, who gets it secondhand from her husband, both of whom are perhaps overly empathetic. Indeed, NDiaye has spoken of her desire to give each character an equal voice.

In the film, the witness figure is not the lawyer but Rama (Kayije Kagame), who agonizes over the story of Laurence, which brings up complicated feelings about her own mother and pending motherhood. The film repeatedly showcases flashbacks to domestic scenes of Rama and her mother, who is cold and distant. In one, her mother drinks her morning chocolat and leaves without greeting the waking Rama, who has just entered the kitchen. In another, video evidence from a seemingly jovial Christmas party in 2000 is shown; the camera lingers over the inscrutable, stony expressions of mother and daughter.

The present-day Rama never outright voices her ambivalence about her pregnancy; instead, the camera rests on her concerned face or her shaking body as she curls into the fetal position on her hotel bed. Although she ostensibly wants this child, she cannot muster her partner’s joyous enthusiasm or bring herself to announce it to her mother. She does develop a casual friendship with Laurence’s mother, Odile Diatta (Salimata Kamate), who instantly guesses that she is pregnant. At one point, Rama even screens Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 adaptation of Medea on her laptop, as Saint Omer doubles down on its core reference: an ancient myth of a mother murdering her own children. Meanwhile, the accused’s story is mostly delivered by her own lips. In addition, she is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, a fact that does not become fully clear until the end of the film.

That said, Saint Omer is not a crime procedural. Unlike Anatomy, there are no scenes of gathering physical evidence, no flashbacks to the life of the couple, and only a brief glimpse of the crime, as the camera closely follows a heavily breathing Laurence as she makes her way down the beach. The bulk of the trial testimony involves character witnesses, including the defendant’s white lover, Luc Dumontet, a sculptor upon whom she is financially dependent, along with her former college professor, an expert ethnographer, and her mother.

If Medea murders her sons to exact revenge, in the film it is not vengeance but care that motivates the mother’s unimaginable crime: Laurence was supposedly trying to protect her daughter from a mauvais sort, a curse. (The real-life Kabou claimed that her child had been the victim of Voodoo sorcery—vaudou is a religion commonly practiced in West Africa and Haiti—and supposedly spent a small fortune consulting nontraditional healers.)

Still, it is not clear if the fictional defendant herself believes this explanation or is following the lead of her lawyer (or the judge who serves as her advocate), Maître Vaudenay (Aurélia Petit). (Insanity defenses in France are understood broadly, as including “psychic or neuropsychic troubles,” according to Article 122-1 of the French penal code. This has led to well-publicized controversies, like the 2021 Sarah Halimi affair, after which the High Court ruled that defendants could no longer plead insanity if they had taken “psychoactive substances.”) More likely, Laurence suffers from isolation and postpartum depression or even psychosis, but this possibility seemingly does not enter the record, perhaps because forensic psychiatry is not yet a fully established field in France.

It might surprise American viewers to know that trial judges in French courtrooms interrogate criminals and witnesses, seemingly with much more leeway than their American counterparts. Based in part on court transcripts, the trial judge (Valérie Dréville) and her inquiry dominate the courtroom scenes. Her questions illuminate Laurence’s past but not her motivations; the defendant is not so much distressed as disappointed. She does not seem to regret having become a mother, after giving birth to the child alone, nor does she shy away from referring to her by her name, Elise, or nickname, Lili.

These are stories not of motherhood but of humanity; as Laurence’s lawyer intones, “we are all monsters. But terribly human monsters.”

If the trial judge sees through the lover’s feigned shock and sadness—had he not hidden his girlfriend and his child from his friends and family?—she also does not spare Laurence, pressing her to come to terms with not just her crime but also her failures. As a student, Laurence had attended classes but not taken exams, so her undergraduate degree had never been validé (conferred). Her dreams of intellectual grandeur were practically moot. In the eyes of outsiders, the young Black woman mostly seems guilty of expecting too much of herself. Her professor, for instance, wonders why she wanted to do a thesis on Wittgenstein, rather than on something “closer to her own culture.” Laurence offers only a half-hearted response, claiming that “Westerners” wouldn’t understand.

On a technical level, the film depicts this back-and-forth between the trial judge and the accused—and the occasional witness or lawyer—in long, one-take shots on Malanda’s face. By the end of the film, the viewer has seen the actress from every angle: from the audience’s pews, from the defense’s side angle, up close (where the witness stand is no longer in view), and so on. These monotonous, long shots also spend an inordinate amount of time in a single-color palette; Malanda’s skin is a deep chestnut, she wears a tan jumpsuit several shades lighter, and she is placed in front of a wall with birch wood paneling. Her impassive face just barely emotes as a lip turns down or quivers, meeting the eye of the camera with a deep, almost dead-eyed stare.

In so depicting her protagonist, Diop forces the viewer to sit uncomfortably with the mother-defendant, the object of a presumably “objective” modern French judiciary that ultimately relies on the oldest mode of determining guilt: reactionary morality.

The film’s intertextual montage also seemingly blurs fact and fiction. Several scholars have identified the borrowed archival footage of l’épuration, mentioned earlier, with a key scene from Hiroshima, whose protagonist Elle (Her) is punished for having taken a German lover. Rama does read some of the dialogue performed by Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) in the original film, but the black-and-white images of women with shaved heads appear to be drawn from other documentary footage shot during World War II. The confusion of reality and its representation come full circle: from tabloid to fiction, to adaptation, to history, to mythology, and back again.

At the end of Saint Omer, Laurence’s judge advocate, Maître Vaudenay, delivers a speech that echoes Rama’s earlier lecture on the postwar purge of French women who allegedly collaborated with the Vichy or Nazi regime. Now, however, Vaudenay looks directly toward the camera, declaring that Laurence’s story is the tale of a “phantom woman” whose “slow disappearance” necessitates medical treatment, not jail time. The camera switches from the maître’s placid face to those of the trial judge, women in the jury, and various wet-eyed women attendees. The maître points out that women’s bodies carry “chimera cells,” which bear some of the fetus’s DNA, long after a miscarriage or birth. (The real-life Kabou was not thinking of DNA; rather, she supposedly compared the sea to “amniotic fluid.”)

Loud sobs can be heard over this testimony; Laurence is weeping but eventually stops. As Vaudenay’s speech fades and the film’s final sequences unfurl, Nina Simone’s melancholic “Little Girl Blue” plays. Saint Omer transforms this trial of a woman accused into a purge of its own, an absolution. 

Featured image: Kayije Kagame in Saint Omer (2022).