Quietly devastating film by Alice Diop about Rama (stunning Kayije Kagame), a writer and professor attending the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Franco-Senegalese graduate student, who murdered her 15-month-old baby on a beach in France.
Laurence is enigmatic and reserved in the courtroom. She admits she doesn’t understand why she killed her child, and her descriptions of isolation and fear and secrecy (even in the birth of the child) paint a portrait of loneliness and desperation. Rama watches the proceedings with a sense of dread. She is 4 months pregnant herself and is fearful she will repeat the chilly, deeply troubled, relationship she has with her own mother (seen in flashbacks where the two barely can look each other in the eye).
But Diop’s coverage of the trial is what makes the film stand out. It is simple and near-documentary-like, and it has a hypnotic effect of the viewer. There are moments that mesmerize- like a connecting look between Rama and Laurence in the courtroom; Rama watching scenes from Pasolini’s Medea starring Maria Callas on her computer and a haunting Nina Simone song later in the film. But the attorney for the defense’s impassioned speech at the end of the trial is the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking sequence in this remarkable, unforgettable film.
