In November, 2013, a baby girl was found drowned on the beach at Berck-sur-Mer, in northwest France. Not long afterward, police arrested the child’s mother, Fabienne Kabou, who was charged with murder. Born and raised in Dakar, Kabou was academically bright, and had come from Senegal to France, where she pursued her studies. She had moved in with a much older man; he was the father of the girl who died.
One of those who attended the subsequent trial, in the town of Saint-Omer, was the filmmaker Alice Diop. Hitherto, Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, “Saint Omer,” which is clearly and closely inspired by the case of Kabou, and which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary. Much of the movie is set in a courtroom, and includes not just lengthy scenes of cross-examination but also, more discomforting still, moments of suspended animation, as it were, during which one character stares or glares at another. The presiding judge (Valérie Dréville) is, quite rightly, the glarer-in-chief.
The defendant in the film is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), who, like her real-life counterpart, hails from Senegal and is highly educated. Calm of demeanor, she admits to having caused the death of her daughter, Élise, but finds it hard to explain how she could have done such a thing, saying, “I hope this trial will give me the answer”—words not often heard in the mouth of an accused person. The mystery grows; Laurence, we learn, told the police that she was the victim of sorcery, cursed by the “evil eye” and hallucinations. She also describes herself as a “Cartesian.” (Warning: do not use that line, in self-defense, anywhere other than France.) Some of her statements, when she is caught out in prevarication, have the air of logical riddles. “If I’m lying, I can’t know why,” she says, to the frustration of the prosecuting counsel (Robert Cantarella).
Other characters take the stand. We meet the child’s father, Luc Dumontet—frail, white, and very well played by Xavier Maly as a paragon of self-pity and slyness. (Molière would recognize the type.) Of his relationship with Laurence, he says, “I would go as far as to say that we were happy, at least in the beginning.” Ah, l’amour! He found it convenient to keep her at arm’s length from his everyday life; it was as if she, and their child, did not officially exist. We can sense “Saint Omer” beginning to mount the case for mitigation, and setting before us a young Black woman corroded both by subtle indifference, in the private sphere, and by a more brazen prejudice elsewhere. A professor, informing the court that Laurence aimed to write a doctoral thesis on Wittgenstein, adds, “Isn’t it rather odd, an African woman interested in an Austrian philosopher from the early twentieth century—why not choose someone closer to her own culture?”
The proceedings are observed, from the gallery, by the tall and stately figure of Rama (Kayije Kagame). For the first fifteen minutes of the movie, we are given the deliberate impression that she is destined to be the heroine. We see her at work—she is a writer and lecturer—and with her loved ones, before she packs a bag and sets off to attend Laurence’s trial. Most viewers will be asking themselves: what is Rama doing here, and what is her connection with Laurence? Well, there is no sign that they are acquainted with each other, and what binds them is empathy, as opposed to plot. Both women are Black, with a Senegalese background; both have (or had) a white partner, in France; both have tricky rapports with their mothers; and both seem simultaneously proud and bowed down by the weight of the world. One last link: Rama is pregnant, and understandably harrowed by the fate of little Élise.
In short, although Rama is not called to testify in court, she is there to bear moral and emotional witness to the saga of Laurence, as Diop was to that of Fabienne Kabou. Thus, when the philosophy professor takes her seat after giving evidence, Rama stares at her with silent and sizzling contempt. (If they were in a Marvel movie, the professor would burst into flames.) More ambiguous is the sight of Laurence turning to gaze, with half a smile, at Rama, who is thoroughly freaked out; is there solidarity in that smile, or a disturbing complicity?
How much we need Rama is another matter. Our reaction to events in court is bound to be nudged and shaped by hers, but one could argue that Laurence’s story is so dramatically strong that it doesn’t require such backup. It’s as though Diop didn’t entirely trust us to read the narrative as we should. That’s why she shows Rama, at the start, teaching students about the French women who were paraded through the streets, with shaved heads, after the Second World War, for alleged collaboration with the Germans; as a bonus, we are then treated to clips from Pasolini’s “Medea” (1969), with Maria Callas in the title role. Public shame, such as that of Laurence, is thereby invested with a certain nobility; infanticide is raised to the level of myth. In a closing speech, delivered directly to the camera, the defending counsel (Aurélia Petit) proclaims that all women are monsters—“terribly human monsters.” All of them?
The most instructive thing about “Saint Omer” is what it omits. Fabienne Kabou was sentenced to twenty years in prison for killing her daughter, reduced on appeal to fifteen. The court was in no doubt as to the severity of the crime. Diop, however, chooses not to reveal either the verdict or the sentence; if you are unfamiliar with the original case, therefore, you might well believe that Laurence has been acquitted and set free. And that is pretty much what Diop, in this finely controlled and subtly controlling film, wants you to believe. (If you already regard the French judicial system as constitutionally racist, so much the better.) Her parable has its desired effect. Laurence, somehow liberated by the telling of her tale, is granted the dignity of a martyr, whose actions were driven by the forces of Western society, not sorcery. And, strange to say, you almost end up forgetting that there was a crime, and that a child, on a cold night, was left to die on a beach.
For reasons that elude me, book editors have never enjoyed the cinematic popularity of zombies, drug lords, and psychopaths. Why not? Could it be a lack of community spirit? Maybe sensitive viewers would be traumatized by the brutal slashing of a paragraph. Nonetheless, the imbalance needs to be redressed, and the best place to start is a new documentary, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.” It details the professional alliance between Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, and Gottlieb, who has edited Caro’s writing for half a century, and who now provides a crisp summation of their method: “He does the work. I do the cleanup. Then we fight.”
The movie is directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, who was forbidden, by her two subjects, to film them in scribente delicto, as they toil over a manuscript. “They said the work between a writer and an editor is too private,” she tells us. (I sniff an opportunity here for an underground trade: basement peepshows, where you feed a nickel into a slot and watch one guy remove another guy’s dangling participles.) Surprisingly, by the end of “Turn Every Page,” the interdict is relaxed, and we get to watch this pair of noble gentlemen—whose combined age is a hundred and seventy-eight—stroll around the offices of Alfred A. Knopf, politely asking for a pencil, like elderly knights who have mislaid their lances. Even then, as they sit side by side and attack the typewritten pages of Caro’s text, their conversation is elided, and overlaid with Chet Baker singing “Do It the Hard Way.”
The way is still hard because Caro has yet to complete the fifth and final volume of the Johnson project. So all-consuming has this been that he and his wife, Ina, once spent three years in the Texas Hill Country, where he could root himself in the background of his subject. (“Can’t you write a biography of Napoleon?” Ina asked.) Gottlieb, for his part, though aware of “heading faster and faster towards not being at all,” waits and waits. His daughter’s movie, ripe with charm, is all the better for its flecks of personal pain—tares among the wheat. What becomes apparent, for example, is that Johnson, Caro, and Gottlieb suffered deeply from the chiding of their furious fathers, who reckoned that their sons would come to naught, and who have since been proved magnificently wrong.
The audience for “Turn Every Page,” I’d guess, will be a medley of Freudians, students of political muscle, and New Yorkers—each bearing a copy of “The Power Broker,” Caro’s 1974 book on Robert Moses, whittled down by Gottlieb to the size of a mere warehouse. Joseph Heller fans, too, will be left agape by the revelation that “Catch-22” was supposed to be “Catch-18” until Gottlieb upped the number. It is punctuators, though, who will be brought to the edge of their seats, roused by the single combat between the movie’s heroes, both of whom, as Gottlieb says, “think a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about.” Only civil? Why not nuclear? ♦
An earlier version of this article misquoted a line in “Saint Omer”.
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