The Existential Ambiguity of Authentic Love in Alice Diop's Saint Omer

Using Simone de Beauvoir's and Frantz Fanon's existentialist phenomenology, this article examines an existentialist ethics of recognition as an act of authentic love in Alice Diop's Saint Omer (2022). Loosely based on a true story, Saint Omer tells a story of filicide: Laurence Coly leaves her baby on a beach to die and we follow the subsequent courtroom drama as it unfolds. The film also follows Rama, a literature professor intending to write up the case as a contemporary version of the Medea myth. I suggest Saint Omer presents an ethics of recognition in its avoidance of the superficial question of what is ethical (the act of filicide); instead it shows how cinema might express an ethics that is central to reciprocal recognition, an expression of authentic love for the other. It asks whether such an ethics of recognition is even possible if it cannot be authentic, that is, if it cannot escape the prescription of recognition already embedded in gendered and colonial relations. Through Beauvoir's philosophy of love and Fanon's notion of ankylosis, I consider how an ethics of recognition can serve as an actional aspect of ambiguity, valorizing the unrealizable of the Other helping to determine the possibility of authentic love.