‘Saint Omer’ Review: A Quietly Momentous French Courtroom Drama That Subtly But Radically Rewrites the Rules of the Game

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang In 2016, in the courtroom of Saint-Omer, a small, untouristed town off a D-road between Calais and Lille, the trial took place of a young Senegalese Frenchwoman accused of murdering her baby: an act so utterly antithetical to accepted ideas of motherhood and womanhood that it is inescapably considered the “worst of all possible crimes.” The woman, a PhD student with a reported genius IQ and a flair for flamboyantly intellectual French, confessed but claimed sorcery as the real culprit.

It’s the kind of true story that presents an obvious opportunity for a sensitive social drama given to sober, sorrowfully objective observations about the perilous, tumbling vortex of class, gender, ethnic and cultural issues in which it plays out. “Saint Omer,” the deceptively austere, extraordinarily multifaceted fiction debut from documentarian Alice Diop, is not that film.

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.

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.