Producers: Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral   Director: Alice Diop    Screenplay: Alice Diop, Amrita David and Marie NDiaye   Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville, Aurélia Petit, Xavier Maly, Robert Canterella, Salimata Kamate, Thomas de Pourquery, Charlotte Clamens and Adama Diallo Tamba   Distributor: Neon

Grade: B+

A 2015 trial that became a tabloid sensation in France—of Fabienne Kabou, a well-educated student from Senegal who nonetheless suggested that sorcery might have impelled her actions in the death of her infant daughter—is treated with an austerity that’s the very opposite of sensationalism in Alice Diop’s provocative semi-fictionalization.  Diop, a documentarian who is herself an immigrant from Senegal, attended Kabou’s trial in Saint-Omer, and while Rama (Kayije Kagame), the writer who observes the judicial proceeding against Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) in the film is not her, she nonetheless acts as the director’s surrogate, and to a certain extent ours.

In a brief prologue, Cody is shown depositing Elise on a beach along the Channel in northern France, in the expectation that the tide will come in and drown the child.  Rama, a professor of literature and novelist working on a modern version of the Medea legend, decides to attend the trial.  Similarities quickly emerge between the two.  Rama’s partner Adrian (Thomas de Pourquery) is a white Frenchman; the father of Coly’s daughter was Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), a much older local artist with whom she lived for years.  Both women have had strained relations with their mothers—we see as much in flashbacks to Rama’s dynamic with her mother (Adama Diallo Tamba), and observe the attitude of Coly’s mother Odile (Salimata Kamate) directly, since she’s prominent in the courtroom and befriends Rama on walks back to their hotels.  Rama is also pregnant, which increases her empathy with Coly, which grows more pronounced as the days pass.

But except back in her room, where she expresses her emotions as thoughts and memories assail her, Rama retains a cool, collected posture as the trial proceeds.  The details of the case emerge through testimony delivered by witnesses under questioning from the judge (Valérie Dréville), an active participant in the French judicial system based on Roman law, and the who barristers, one for the defense (Aurélia Petit) and the other for the prosecution (Robert Canterella), who are often perplexed, even annoyed, by the unemotional directness of Coly’s responses and her seeming inability to explain her actions (she even expresses the hope that the trial will explain them to her).  Yet the self-serving remarks of Dumontet, a craven character who tries to portray himself in a good light without much success, and of one of Coly’s professors (Charlotte Clamens), who expresses surprise that Coly, with her background, should have chosen Wittgenstein as a thesis subject, suggest a barely suppressed sense of superiority and condescension with racial and cultural overtones.

“Saint Omer” is hardly a typical, Hollywood-style courtroom drama, as one might intuit from the mention of Wittgenstein, otherwise unexplained, and of Coly’s offhanded remark that she is a Cartesian, also without further elaboration.  And by the close the crime of which Coly is accused is nearly forgotten, replaced by an overriding concern for the victimization of immigrant women, and indeed of all women, that the defense barrister emphasizes in her summation, pointedly presented directly to the camera, a tactic through which we are all challenged to reach a judgment ourselves.

That impassioned monologue looks back to the start of the film, the lecture delivered by Rama to her class before she travels to Saint-Omer. Her topic was Marguerite Duras’ screenplay for “Hiroshima, mon amour,” accompanied by news footage of women believed to have consorted with Nazi soldiers during the occupation shaved and paraded through the streets as a means of public shaming. The juxtaposition might seem to some a bit of a stretch, but it certainly makes Diop’s point.

Diop even withholds the usual satisfaction of hearing a verdict announced.  Rather this is a film that has been constructed to put viewers in the same position in which Diop found herself in 2015—coming to terms with what might have led a mother to commit an inexplicable act.  Some will undoubtedly find this frustrating, but it’s an audacious artistic choice, and overall one successfully played out.

The film is expertly made.  Diop’s calm, reflective style, which treats silences and pauses with as much, if not more, importance as the monologues, gives ample opportunity to the cast to make the characters breathe despite their general reticence and control.  Kagame and Malanda are both quietly compelling, their glances toward one another carrying unspoken power, and the entire supporting cast contribute to the atmosphere of complexity and hidden undercurrents, with Maly particularly unsettling as a weak, duplicitous man straining nervously to justify his crass conduct.  Shot largely in the locations where events unfolded—including the courtroom—the film has air of somehow elevated authenticity, accentuated by Anna Le Mouel’s unadorned production design and Claire Mathon’s serene, unobtrusive cinematography; the measured editing by Amrita David complements Diop’s ruminative approach.

A fact-based courtroom drama that upends the genre’s usual histrionics, Diop’s film is artistically inspired as well as inspired by an unspeakable act.

Producer: Edward L. Alperson   Director: William Cameron Menzies  Screenplay: Richard Blake   Cast: Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke, Morris Ankrum, Max Wagner, Bill Phipps, Milburn Stone, Janine Perreau, Bert Freed, Douglas Kennedy, Robert Shayne, Barbara Billingsley and Richard Deacon Distributor: Ignite Films

Grade: B+

This modestly-budgeted 1953 sci-fi movie written by Richard Blake, who otherwise had a thoroughly unremarkable career, is basically a mash-up of “War of the Worlds” (George Pa’s film of which appeared later that same year) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (released in 1956), told from a young boy’s point of view.  Had it been filmed in the workmanlike but uninspired fashion of the time by some journeyman director, and shot in black-and-white, it would probably be forgotten today.  But instead it was turned over to the brilliant William Cameron Menzies, who employed his own stylized production design and lustrous color cinematography by the renowned John F. Seitz to give it a hauntingly hallucinatory, dreamlike quality that, given its protagonist is a ten-year old kid, resonated powerfully with youngsters.  If you saw it in 1953, as some of us are old enough to have done, the experience has probably stuck with you all your life.

In the years since its original release, the film has fared badly; choppy cable showings and inferior VHS and DVD versions undermined its reputation.  Tobe Hooper’s mediocre 1986 remake did not help.  But now Amsterdam-based Ignite Films offers as its initial release a beautiful 4K restoration, available in both 4K UHD and Blu-Ray, that allows you to see Menzies’ mesmerizing vision in its full glory again.

The story begins with young David (Jimmy Hunt) getting up early to train his telescope on the night sky, only to witness a flying saucer imbedding itself in the sand pit behind his house.  His loving parents (Leif Erickson and Hillary Brooke) insist that he’s dreaming, but he’s not, of course.  Huge green mutant slaves in the buried ship, directed by a disembodied female head in a transparent globe, are transforming anyone who is swallowed up by the sands into pawns in their plan to conquer the earth.  Policemen, soldiers, and even David’s own  mother and father are among the victims, and only the boy’s enlistment of adults who  come to believe him—a pretty health worker (Helena Carter) and a ultra-serious scientist (Arthur Franz)—disrupts the invaders’ scheme.  But is it truly foiled?  An ending that circles back to the start leaves the question dangling.  Or is the whole story a recurrent nightmare?

“Invaders from Mars” is an example of the paranoia that infected American society in the aftermath of World War II, reflected in the McCarthy Communist-hunting often discussed as the subtext to “Body Snatchers.” But the fact that the person crying wolf is a boy rather than a man, as in Don Siegel’s classic, makes a great difference.  David comes to mistrust and fear all authority figures, including his own parents—a theme that was radical for its time, and looked forward to the sixties, when the young generation completely lost faith in the establishment.

But the film is well worth resurrecting not only for what it says but how it says it.  Menzies’ use of sets and visual compositions that reflect a child’s perspective, along with the wondrous palette Seitz draws in the rare SuperCinecolor process, give it a special quality, worthy of comparison to that of another cult classic of the fifties, Charles Laughton’s remarkable black-and-white masterpiece “The Night of the Hunter.”  Contemporary viewers accustomed to cheap shocks and rapid-fire editing may be disappointed with its reliance on mood and atmosphere over gotcha moments.  Both those willing to make allowances for changes in taste will find that it retains a genuinely creepy vibe, and of course those who recall it with affection will find their nostalgic impulses amply rewarded.    

Not that “Invaders” is free of flaws.  Some of the performances are rather stilted and a few of the choices—like the green outfits worn by the mutant slaves—can cause giggles.  The short running time, moreover, led to repetitive shots of the mutants lumbering down underground caverns, and to the overuse of stock footage of military vehicles making their way to the sand pits is regrettable.

But one can easily forgive the lapses in view of the quality of Ignite’s loving release, in which the film’s virtues are restored to their full effect.

The issue is enhanced by an excellent collection of bonus features.  In addition to the original 1953 trailer and a new trailer for this release, they include a featurette on the career of Menzies by his biographer James Curtis, who invites the director’s granddaughter Pamela Lauesen to add some personal memories, and another, “Terror From Above,” in which interviewees like directors Joe Dante and John Landis, visual effects designer Robert Skotak, editor Mark Goldblatt and film preservationist Scott MacQueen, among others, discuss the impact the film had on them as well as how it reflected the tenor of its time. MacQueen discusses the restoration process in a separate featurette that offers side-by-side before-and-after comparisons, and an interview features Hunt describing his career as a child actor and reminiscing about the “Invaders from Mars” shoot and his decision to leave the business shortly afterward.  Writer-director John Sayles offers an amusing introduction to a Turner Classic Movie Festival screening of the restored film, and there is restored 2K footage of an extended scene and alternate ending shot for the film’s European release.  An image gallery complements an informative, well-illustrated booklet discussing technical aspects of the original production and details of the restoration process.

In all, a splendid first issue from Ignite Films that does this imaginative, dreamlike fifties sci-fi classic, the penultimate picture designed and directed by William Cameron Menzies, proud.