Omar m’a tuer (2011) - film review

On 24th June 1991, Ghislaine Marchal is found dead in the cellar of her villa at Mougins.  The words "Omar killed me" are written in blood near the body.  A few days later, Marchal’s gardener Omar Raddad is arrested and thrown into jail.  The obvious suspect, Omar has a poor comprehension of French and so cannot defend himself.  Seven years later, he is pardoned and released from prison, but he is still thought to be his employer’s murderer.   The writer Pierre-Emmanuel Vaugrenard is convinced of Omar’s innocence and begins his own investigation to uncover the truth...

The most publicised murder case in France in the 1990s was that of a comfortably off widow, Ghislaine Marchal, who was believed to have been brutally killed by her gardener Omar Raddad.  A Moroccan immigrant who could barely speak French, Raddad was arrested and convicted on the flimsiest evidence following a frenzied media campaign orchestrated by the less racially tolerant stratum of the French press.  This meticulously researched film, soberly directed by the award winning actor Roschdy Zem and featuring Sami Bouajila in his most captivating screen portrayal to date, recounts Raddad’s harrowing ordeal and brings to our attention some terrifying flaws in the French judicial system.  Raddad’s guilt or innocence is hardly the point of the film (although Zem’s own opinion on the matter is self-evident from his sympathetic portrayal of the accused man).  Rather, Omar m’a tuer is a salutary reminder of how easily the legal processes can be subverted for political expediency.  When the hounds are baying for blood, who can resist throwing them the first scrap of meat that comes to hand?

The film is partly inspired by Omar Raddad’s "Pourquoi moi?", a poignant account of his trial and imprisonment, and another book entitled "Omar: la construction d’un coupable", by Jean-Marie Rouart.  The latter, a renowned author and essayist, was never convinced of Raddad’s guilt and set out to establish irregularities in the police investigation and subsequent trial.  Rouart is himself depicted in the film as the investigative writer Pierre-Emmanuel Vaugrenard, ably played by Denis Podalydès.  Even though Raddad was finally granted a pardon by French president Jacques Chirac and released from prison in 1998, he remains guilty as charged in the eyes of the law.  Despite having amassed a substantial body of evidence that might result in Raddad’s acquittal, Rouart and his defence lawyer Jacques Vergès were unsuccessful in getting his case reopened.   Raddad’s fight to clear his name continues.  If he succeeds, his case will go down as the most notorious miscarriage of French justice since the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s.

The film takes its title from the one sliver of hard evidence on which the prosecution case hinged but which immediately rings alarm bells in the head of any student of the French language.  The words ‘Omar m’a tuer’ were found scrawled in the victim’s blood on a wall near to her body, in the manner of a cheap crime novel.  The fact that the phrase was grammatically incorrect (it should of course have been Omar m’a tuée) and was clearly legible, having been written in pitch darkness (by an educated old lady who would most likely have died from her wounds before completing her convenient mural denunciation) did not appear to weaken the prosecution’s case one iota.  Consider the facts. The victim had a gardener named Omar; he is a suspicious-looking foreigner (well, he is black); and his name is clearly spelled out in block capitals right next to the victim’s body.  What more evidence was needed?   Actually, as the film reveals, there was plenty of additional evidence, but this tended to point away from the desired verdict.  In their separate investigations, Rouart and Vergès uncovered evidence that may have prevented Raddad from even being brought to trial, had it not been swept under the carpet by the police or else tampered with to weaken his alibi (allegedly).

As he unpicks Raddad’s Kafkaesque brush with French justice, Zem recounts a tale of legal malpractice that can hardly fail to chill the blood of anyone who watches it.  Whilst the director’s own belief in the Moroccan’s innocence is pretty apparent, he succeeds in sowing doubt in the mind of the spectator, and by doing so he shows how easily we can be misled by our own prejudices.  This is only Zem’s second film as a director - his first being the comedy Mauvaise foi (2006), a more lighthearted look at racial intolerance - but already he has proved (beyond any reasonable doubt) that he can tackle complex, socially pertinent subjects with insight and compassion.   Omar m’a tuer affords us an opportunity to reflect on the insidious racial bias that is still endemic in western society and which has the potential to send a man to prison (and, in some states of the U.S., have him executed) for a crime he has not committed.  We may think we are living in a colour-blind, racially neutral society where everyone is treated equally by the judiciary, but as this film powerful demonstrates, this is far from being the case.

© James Travers 2012

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