Death & Dreams: Two Days at Lincoln Center

Death and Dreams: Saint Omer and Dialogues des Carmélites

Saint Omer is a quiet, steady film. The camera is almost as still as our central character, Laurence, standing in the dock of a French courtroom on trial for infanticide. The audience plays silent witness to these scenes, watching jury selection, days of questioning, and final arguments. As the room subtly darkens and brightens with passing clouds, we begin to piece together the opposing sides of Laurence’s brutal history.

The story of another French-Senegalese woman dances around the edges of director Alice Diop’s film. Rama, a professor and novelist, has traveled to witness the trial. Like Laurence, she feels disconnected from her family. Perhaps Rama has the life that Laurence’s mother expected from her daughter: educated, speaking perfect French, with a good job and family, established in society—the immigrant parent’s dream. But Laurence can’t stand the expectations of her parents and quickly moves in with an older man because she can’t afford an apartment and he’ll pay for her education.

Because the man has his own family—he even asks her to cook for his daughter’s wedding but doesn’t allow them to meet—she doesn’t feel prioritized. Perhaps it’s understandable that he doesn’t want to be involved, and she doesn’t call him as labor begins and eventually gives birth to Lili at home. But we also learn she doesn’t register Lili, bought few infant supplies, and doesn’t take to the baby to doctor when a case of chicken pox erupts: death would totally obscure a life that, to almost everyone else, never existed.

Laurence fully admits to murdering her daughter. The film opens with Laurence walking on the beach, the moon shining a jack-o-lantern glow, soon revealed as the crime scene where she left her daughter, Lili, to the waves. Should Laurence be held at fault when her entire life in France has been “cursed,” or is this all a product of chance and bad luck? Though the curse is suggested to be genuine malevolence, perhaps a hex from sinister aunties, the implication of Western racism is clear.

Less tidy, and what gives the film meaning beyond Laurence’s ripped-from-the-headlines tale, is Rama’s presence. She claims the case as material for a retelling of Medea, but the parallels to her own life are terrifyingly close for comfort. With her mixed-raced relationships, difficult family relations, and immigrant history, the distance between Rama’s success and Laurence’s tragedy is a path with few diversions. Society gives both women an extraordinary burden to bear—living is its own victory.

Despite her best efforts to find a life worth living, Blanche de la Force does not survive Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. Generously described as a nervous wreck, she jumps at shadows and lives in a constant state of worry; infantilization by her brother and father, Marquis and Chevalier, do not help. After a frightening encounter with a peasant mob in Revolutionary France, she longs to join the Carmelites for the solitude of prayer—the only option she has to avoid life’s terrors.

Death clouds Blanche’s past and present: her biological mother passed mere hours after she was born, and her Mother Superior assumes a painful deathbed shortly after admitting Blanche to the Order, privately prophesying the abbey’s destruction. If these shadows were not enough, her fellow novice, Constance, shares a vision that they will die together, on the same day.

Blanche balks at Constance’s idea that Mother Superior’s difficult death may ease the demise of another; the concept of death itself continues to hang and terrify. As the sisters debate the present danger amongst themselves, contemplating their own martyrdom, Blanche—despite her vocal preference for life—assents to what is basically suicide pact.

In the French Revolution’s fervor, perception is guilt and condemnation swift. By mere association with the state’s papal enemy, and without any recognition of their lives past or potential value, the Carmelites are sentenced to death. Blanche escapes imprisonment by running home to her aristocratic estate, only to find that it, too, was ransacked and seized. Unable to bear a life on the run, and struggling with a guilty conscience, Blanche willingly joins her sisters at the guillotine.

These stories struck a thematic chord. Beyond the obvious—France, courts, dreams, death—both depict a forced and helpless struggle against society. Though of a different class, and diminishing the impact of historical and contemporary race relations, both Laurence and Blanche de la Force are imperiled simply by the fact of their gender.

As 18th-century women, the Carmelite sisters have little agency to live how they please. Pledging oneself to God was one path—and certainly the most righteous—to avoid the subsumption of marriage. Blanche’s nervousness practically forces her down the path of devotion: she is clearly too ill to make an attractive marriage prospect, as would be expected from her class, but this presumably comes only at the price of her privileged dowry. Her relationship with aristocracy (by birth) and the Carmelites (by choice) is enough for the mob’s rushed judgement.

A thin invisible line separates Rama and Laurence, despite the similarity of their background and situation. By parsing through the details of Laurence’s experience, struggle by struggle, Saint Omer asks us directly, in the form of a final speech delivered by Laurence’s attorney, to consider the wider circumstance that led to her action. The dearth of opportunity for a jobless immigrant is compounded by pregnancy into sheer and total dependency. Mental illness, meager finances, strained relationships, unwanted pregnancy, living black in France—any combination of these factors create a scenario in which daily life is untenable or even impossible, much less raising a child. Both Blanche and Laurence use the means at their disposal to make life bearable. Neither are solely responsible for their fates; they act just to survive, until they cannot.