Directing: C
Acting: C-
Writing: B
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C

Maybe Saint Omer just isn’t for me. What possible insight could I, a gay White American man, have about a film depicting the trial of an immigrant African French woman who killed her baby, also directed by a French woman of African descent? My knowledge of problematic French colonialist history is limited at best, and my best frame of reference is my own complicated relationship with my own mother, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is depicted onscreen here. There’s a lot of Venn diagrams that can be built here, where the circles just overlap at all.

All of that is to say: I’m a little insecure about judging this film, which critics by and large seem to be tripping over themselves to declare a stunningly brilliant piece of work, and I seem completely unable to see it. I went searching for what few reviews panned it, and predictably, they are generally White men. Are there any women who hated this movie? I found one, and then realized she was also White. Dammit! It would be a lot easier to feel vindicated in my distaste for this film if I could find any women of color who felt the same way. (To be fair, working women critics of color are hard to find overall, let alone any who also could not connect with the same film that failed to move me.)

How much general audiences like this movie also varies depending on the source. At Rotten Tomatoes, the “tomatometer” score is 95%; the audience score 25%. Over at IMDb.com, the average rating of this film is 7/10—pretty high by that site’s usual user rating standards. As you can tell, I’m eager to decipher whether I somehow missed something everyone else is managing to see in this film.

And I have to tell you, it bored me half to death. And not because of the subject matter, which is compelling (if not salacious) by definition, but because of the way the movie is shot, edited, and acted. Everything about how this film is put together put me off.

It took me a while even to understand why director and co-writer Alice Diop chose this structure: although the film is ostensibly about the incomprehensible act of a woman leaving her baby to die on a beach at high tide—that being based on a true event—the protagonist here is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist who is attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) with the idea of it informing her work. Saint Omer (the title is a reference to a town in France, where the trial is taking place) is sprinkled with brief flashbacks of Rama as a young girl, unable to connect with her blank-faced, stoic mother. It takes a while to realize we met this same mother, in the present day, during one of the opening scenes, when Rama visits her family, standing awkwardly and not chatting or connecting with anyone.

I was mystified enough by that introduction to Rama, but still keeping an open mind and being patient. The setting shifts to the French courtroom, where a good majority of the film takes place, and finally something interesting happens: this is when we meet Laurence, learn that she is charged with infanticide, and most bizarre of all, she both admits to killing the baby—that part is never a mystery—and pleads not guilty. And then Alice Diop trains her largely stationery camera on extended shots of the judge, or the defendant, or Rama, during jury selection, preliminary questions, and more.

And it goes on. And on. And on. And on. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the delivery of the actors, which consistently stops just short of deadpan. The characters nearly always speak softly, as though it’s just the normal way all humans talk, even though it isn’t. This is not to say there are never any displays of emotion—the prosecuting attorney is increasingly frustrated with Laurence’s demonstrably inconsistent testimony, and there’s a moment, during the rare time we see her in her hotel room rather than in the courtroom, when Rama breaks down weeping.

The cinematography is rudimentary at best, and it’s possible I hated that most of all, the way the camera moves very slowly in straight lines back and forth or up and down, if it moves at all. I spent a long time wondering why the hell we were spending so much time watching Laurence’s testimony rather than, say, seeing her story in flashbacks. What the hell happened to “show, don’t tell”? This movie is almost nothing but “telling,” rendering it one of the least cinematic films I have seen in ages. And then I realized: this movie is “showing,” by telling the story, ultimately, of how attending this trial and witnessing the aforementioned testimony is affecting Rama. Mind you, Rama is never revealed to have any direct connection to the defendant or her crime, although more gets revealed to explain her interest.

I can’t help but wonder if I am being unfair to this film—a feeling I have only because of its otherwise universal critical acclaim—but I can only be honest about my personal experience with it. When the film ended, after what felt like an eternity of tedium, I felt sweet relief.

*I’m just as bored as all these people look.*

Overall: C