For far too long movies set in contemporary France have portrayed a myopically white world, void of immigrants and people of color and utterly divorced from the on-the-ground reality apparent to even the most cursory visitor. That’s slowly beginning to change, but this year brings the strongest endorsement of that perspective yet, with the country’s newly assembled Oscar committee selecting Alice Diop’s Saint Omer as France’s official submission for the best international feature Academy Award. (Its last win in that category was three decades ago, for Indochine in 1992.)
Cloaked in the sheep’s clothing of a courtroom drama, Saint Omer is a provocative consideration of how race is performed as well as projected (particularly when it comes to Black women in the West) and the primal and often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. The facts of the case are undisputed from the outset: In the northern French town of Saint-Omer, a Senegalese philosophy student named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) has been arrested for abandoning her baby on the beach, leaving the child to drown. She admits to the crime but pleads not guilty, and the remainder of the film divines what would drive someone to commit such an act. When asked flat-out by the judge for her reason in the hearing’s first minutes, the defendant replies: “I don’t know—I hope this trial will give me the answer.”
The case is drawn from astonishing real-life events and much of the dialogue is lifted verbatim from court transcripts. Diop was compelled to attend the highly publicized 2016 trial, and her surrogate in the film is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a Paris author (also of Senegalese descent, like Diop) who observes the trial in silence and slowly begins to unravel as the case overwhelms her.
Saint Omer is the director’s first narrative feature after a career till now in documentaries, including 2001’s acclaimed We, a tender portrait of the multiplicity of communities traversed by a suburban rail line. At the Venice Film Festival, Saint Omer won the Silver Lion grand jury prize and the award for best debut feature, and after landing on many critics’ year-end lists, it’s expected to garner Oscar attention.
For all its sly twists and glancing revelations, it’s a film of exceptional stillness and quiet, with much of the churning tumult happening in the viewer’s mind as the quicksilver story tilts our assumptions and judgments. There are also long, unbroken passages of riveting testimony, some spanning 20 minutes. (Long-take master Frederick Wiseman inspired Diop to become a documentarian.) The scenes are beautifully and patiently lensed by Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman) and often spellbindingly held by the faces of Malanda and Kagame, a first-time Swiss actor who caught Diop’s eye after raising her hand to ask the director a question at a screening Q&A.
Vogue spoke with Diop and Malanda this week about cliché roles for Black actors, how the lingering shots evoke Diop’s own experience at the trial, and the one singular piece of music that haunted the writing of the script.
Vogue: This film is anchored by two towering performances; their presence is almost transfixing. Alice, how did you cast your actors?
Alice Diop: I wrote the film with both actresses in mind, even though I hadn’t told them yet that I was thinking about using them. I had the echo of their presence and personality in mind when I was writing. I had an unusual hunch that they were the only ones who could play those characters, and it was a strong intuition I kept for a long time.
I understand you gave them a year to consider the roles.
Diop: I gave both of my actresses the time to assimilate and accept these parts. It was not so much the kind of casting where I was trying to evaluate one actress versus another. It was the meeting of myself and them as much as the meeting of them and the parts.
Guslagie, what did you think when you first heard about this project?
Guslagie Malanda: I couldn’t say yes without thinking about it. It was a big responsibility. I knew saying yes meant a lot of preparation and rehearsals. I prepared a bit like an athlete for this role, especially regarding how to breathe inside each word.
You sought out a tai chi master. How did you decide to do that?
Malanda: I had the intuition that I didn’t want an acting coach. I didn’t want someone to teach me how to pronounce the words and prepare with the text. A friend who’s not in the industry recommended I try tai chi. The script has a lot of words, and you have to breathe inside every sentence. We worked on breathing, and breathing is living, so it was very intense, like meditation. And we never talked about the role, the character, or the filming—I didn’t want to talk about that at all with him. We worked only on the breath.
You hadn t acted in seven years before this. Why?
Malanda: I didn’t want to be a cliché. Those seven years were just after the attacks in Paris and also during the migrant crisis in Europe. I don’t know if it’s really connected, but I think it’s always connected because art is about people’s fantasies. The fantasy of arts is the fantasy of society. And when politically the situation is weird in your country or area, you have a lot of scripts and proposals that are very cliché. I can play a migrant, a prostitute, a bad girl coming from a ghetto as long as those are true characters and there is a background, a complexity, and a purpose. And it’s not a judgment: Actors have to eat, we have to pay rent and bills. There aren’t many Black actors in France, and it’s difficult to get roles, especially leading roles. Your role is already determined in a way—sometimes good, sometimes bad—and linked to your skin color. It’s not the same thing for white people, who can have roles that aren’t necessarily connected to skin color.
Alice, there are many long, static takes and the film is suffused with quietness, but it still manages to be enthralling. How did you decide on the pacing?
Diop: One of my first decisions was that the film would be built from very long single takes. My experience with the trial was extremely intense, and I was fixated on all the exchanges between the judge and the defendant. I wanted to render that intensity in the film as well. Strangely this intensity brought about within me some very dark, very personal things that didn’t necessarily enhance my understanding of the person I was watching—and this increased my fascination with this character. Those long takes were the best way to convey for the audience the experience and feeling that I had during the trial. And I knew it was going to work because I’ve done this in my documentary work as well. The intensity of these dialogues was very well served by Guslagie’s beautiful performance—we don’t feel the time passing. We are completely hanging on her words.
Guslagie, you have extended stretches of dialogue or monologue and also periods of silence and stillness. Can you compare the two?
Malanda: They were connected. In a trial you have to speak, but you also have to listen a lot. You are allowed or not allowed to speak by the judge. You have only these very strategic times to speak. But in Alice’s films, silence sometimes says something much more important than speaking.
Alice, how did your documentary work influence this film? You’ve said that you don’t consider them two different things.
Diop: Documentaries are about the search for truth and the real. In documentary you cannot fake it, and in fiction I am seeking something equivalent—this truth where you don’t feel that people are acting or that things are fake. I actually asked the actresses to watch Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries instead of fictional movie scenes, as that was really what I was searching for.
Guslagie, I understand Alice didn’t give you much direction about your character and that your interpretation ended up different from the one that she had written. Can you say how your idea differed from Alice’s?
Malanda: Alice went to the real trial, so for her Laurence Coly is a character who’s connected to Fabienne Kabou, the real woman. I was too young during the real trial and didn’t remember the case at all, so the story was very new to me. Alice has this memory of the real woman, but for me I met the woman through this character in the script. My version of Laurence Coly couldn’t have been the same as Alice’s.
Alice, the music in the film is deployed sparingly and strategically. Can you say a little bit about your choice of music?
Diop: While I was writing the script, I was haunted by a particular piece by Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, which evokes a sense of anxiety. It has been overused in cinema, but that mood brought me to the work of Caroline Shaw. The work of hers that I chose is inspired by the mood of Philip Glass except that it is more feminine, particularly with all the women’s voices. There was something very organic and visceral about it that I felt resonated with our deep, ancient connection with mothers and also linked to the tradition of a tragic Greek chorus. I really clicked with this music immediately and felt it was perfect to express the interiorities of the main characters.
Saint Omer opens nationwide January 13.
