In 1985, the French newspaper Libération sent the celebrated writer Marguerite Duras to cover a sensational crime captivating France: the death of a four-year-old boy, “little Grégory,” in the Vologne, a river in the east of the country. What made this case so shocking to onlookers was that the child was presumed to have been murdered and disposed along the riverbank by his mother, Christine Villemin. Though Villemin refused all interviews, Duras, after visiting the outside of the family’s home in Lépanges, declared with trancelike conviction that she knew “instinctively” Villemin had done it from the sight of the rural locale alone. In the scandalous write-up that followed, still notorious in France, Duras reimaged Villemin, who was later convicted of all charges, as an innocent woman in a novel that fixated on the mother’s “sublime” character, and treated the whole episode as an opportunity to reflect on the complexities of female agency.

In 2016, when the filmmaker Alice Diop began attending the real-life trial of French-Senegalese woman Fabienne Kabou, accused of killing her fifteen-month-old infant by abandoning her body on the beach in Berck in northern France, she feared she was herself reproducing, in her words, “some Duras bullshit.” In her fascination with the crime’s events, Diop was anxious that, like the legendary author with Villemin, she was broadcasting all manner of assumptions and projections onto an unknown woman whose official legal sentence was forthcoming.

Yet Diop was not alone in her fabulation. The specific case of Kabou confounded French onlookers, too. She was a black woman capable of “the unthinkable,” but she was not working class. Her speech, a hyper-literary French, signaled at her bourgeois education but flummoxed observers incapable of imagining that a black woman from a bourgeois background could . . . act like a bourgeois woman.