Kayije Kagame in Saint Omer (Super LTD)

A talky, heady, and metaphorical courtroom drama based on a true story, Saint Omer conceals depths of sadness beneath its intellectual and legalistic surface. As a result, Alice Diop’s debut drama reveals the harsh personal toll of racism and exclusion in contemporary France.

The foreshadowing of a tragedy begins early. Tall, regal Black writer and academic Rama (Kayije Kagame) opens the film with a classroom lecture accompanied by archival footage on the punishment meted on alleged women Nazi collaborators—public head shavings and parades through the streets. It’s a reference to shame, particularly public female shame. A dinner with Rama’s mother and sisters and her White boyfriend is an awkward affair, with a pulsing subtext of something unmentioned.

Tension rises further when Rama arrives in the provincial Norman town of Saint Omer to witness the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a young Senegalese graduate student indicted for drowning her baby. A probing inquest presided over by all-White legal teams tries to get to the bottom of the heinous act as a sharp female judge and other court personnel interrogate Laurence over what led her to crisis. A camera fixed on Laurence during her testimony heightens the sense of a person and life being mercilessly examined.

Laurence’s almost matter-of-fact retelling of her personal history reveals a journey of misery, with the young woman shuttled between a rejecting father and a calculating mother, falling adrift in France’s demanding academic system, and impregnated by an older Frenchman who concealed her and the child’s existence, hiding her away from his family and keeping her confined at home. News reports marvel over the young African woman’s perfect French. It’s clear she is not only being tried for a shocking crime, but for her relationship to French culture and her ability to live up to French standards.

Racism emerges in the courtroom in the person of a prosecutor who oils his questions with sarcasm and erupts in fury at Laurence’s carefully thought-out answers. A haughty professor questions Laurence’s fitness to write a thesis on Wittgenstein, declaring that she should have focused on a subject from her own culture. Frequently the camera cuts back to Rama, wincing in empathy with Laurence’s being judged as a Black woman in a White system. The film creates echoes between Rama’s life and that of the accused, with home video flashbacks of uncomfortable scenes between Rama and her mother. Rama’s encounter with Laurence’s strangely tone-deaf mother proves disquieting too.

These parallels seem biting and insightful at first, but may feel too on-the-nose to some. The facts are stark, though. Both Rama and Laurence find themselves ambivalent toward mothers and motherhood and only conditionally accepted in the society in which they live, which gives the movie a pathos beyond its formal confines.

A work as smart as Saint Omer is not going to tip into an absolute polemic, and instead it finds some redeeming features in its circumstances. Laurence seems confused by what led to her predicament, and the court’s keen line of questioning may help her make sense of it and let it sink in. Although the judicial proceeding is tinged with class and racial prejudice, it is also inquisitive, thorough, and above all interested in the truth; those who have cravenly let Laurence down are exposed; and the accused is allowed much more opportunity to speak for herself than in any parallel system in the United States. In one of the Diop’s few conventional nods to a courtroom drama, a sensitive, brilliant speech by her attorney brings a literary flourish to the trial’s closing. Unfortunately, the film lets its own high-level intelligence down with a paint-by-numbers ambiguous ending. That cop-out aside, there are still many poignant questions to ponder in this ambitious social drama. And to mourn.