Maternity is a biological event: the availability of the unconscious is necessary.

Laurence Coly killed her fifteen-month-old daughter by leaving her on a beach, hoping that the sea would take her away. But the sea left her there, and the mother is on trial.

Appearing in court with handcuffs on her wrists, Laurence confesses without hesitation and without providing remotely valid reasons.

All of this under the eyes of the mother, the judge, lawyers, and the prosecutor, but also under the gaze of Rama, a writer and alter ego of the director, who is pregnant with a child.

Based on a true story, Diop reconstructs the actual criminal trial that took place in France in 2016.

Long sequence shots, silences alternating with questions that seek to understand, like those of the judge, those that insinuate intentionality and lucidity of the prosecutor, and those of the young mother's lawyer, who tries to understand and make others understand. The sacredness, the sense of oppression experienced is suffocating, while on the screen appear the images of Pasolini and that Medea that hovers in the history of tragedy, literature, and cinema.

The myth of the mother, that artfully constructed myth that shatters every time as if it were the first time, in the form of incomprehensibly astonished and astounded questions.

Within women, two antithetical subjectivities struggle because one lives at the expense of the other. One subjectivity says "I," and one subjectivity makes the woman feel like the trustee of the "species."

Saint Omer, once again tears the screen, compressing the distances between fiction and reality with a bleeding and at the same time coagulating gaze: in the incomprehensibility of the act, everything becomes clear and distinct, albeit tragically.

Laurence Coly, in her distant and at times icy coldness, carefully answers the questions without giving in to formal expressiveness.

The dry and minimalist aesthetics of the legal reconstruction allow the viewer to feel part of those bodies, victims or murderers, who are often just names consumed by the news without a lived experience to identify and investigate, and to which to restore dignity and identity.

The mystery that hovers unfolds in all its complexity in the impossibility of remaining indifferent.

A debut work inspired by the true story of Fabienne Kagou, who also evoked the dark presence of witchcraft, alluded to by Laurence Coly.

How can our culture understand it, a banal suggestion or the deep fabric of a culture to be embraced and investigated?

The mother-daughter relationship is also one of the main focal points of the film, on which unsettling questions revolve and which will find in the unforgettable final plea the ontological turn of the mystery of procreation.

A succession of mostly feminine connections between conception and the distribution of cells among those who produce life and those who inherit it, and the oppressive responsibility that all of this entails.

Is Laurence a victim of witchcraft, simply a murderer, or mad?

It can be everything or nothing, but the final plea, which will remain unforgettable in the history of cinema, gives it a clear interpretation, deconstructing any anthropological, cultural, ethical, and logical prejudice.

The responsibility of procreation, one and trine, goes far beyond sustaining one's offspring, and becoming aware of it can become unbearable and lead to madness.

Maternity, procreation, culture, anthropology, myth, tragedy, madness, and individual and social responsibility: all of this is masterfully brought into play by Diop in an indisputable debut work, for its conceptual intensity and cultural depth, and for its ability to register the right distance through the infallibility and complexity of the metronome to explore the tortuousness of human madness rather than relegate it to psychiatric casuistry and dismiss it in the perfect style of denial.

03-May-2023 by Fab