Atlantique
Mati Diop (2019)
In 2008, Mati Diop played the lead role in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. The following year, Diop directed a short (16-minute) called Atlantiques. Ten years on, her debut feature, with the same French title minus the ‘s’, became the first film by a black female director to screen in competition at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. Now thirty-seven, Diop was born in Paris but her family is Senegalese (the film-maker Djibril Diop Mambéty was her uncle) and so are the characters in both versions of Atlantique(s). The short film is about a dangerous sea journey undertaken by a group of migrants. A similar boat crossing is crucial to this new work too, although it never features in the action of Atlantics, which takes place on dry land, in Dakar. The supernatural is also crucial: Mati Diop and Olivier Demangel, who co-wrote the screenplay with her, dramatise the interaction of urgent socio-economic issues in present-day Senegal and the country’s credal and psychical traditions. The latter do more than make her film distinctive. They’re also the means of meting out moral justice in the story that Diop tells.
The opening sequences of Atlantics are set on a building site on the outskirts of Dakar, adjacent to a futuristic-looking tower. The construction workers who’ve built the tower haven’t been paid for the last three months: it’s no surprise they’re both angry and in dire financial straits. One of the labourers, a young man called Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), is particularly vehement in protesting to the site supervisor about the unpaid wages. As he and his co-workers travel back, in a truck, from their workplace to the city centre, Souleiman seems a man apart in a different way. While the others sing and joke to keep their spirits up, he’s silent and unsmiling. After a while, he starts to move his head and shoulders in rhythm with the singing but he gives the impression of dissenting from the show of good cheer – shaking his head at it rather than joining in. All the time, the truck is on a road running alongside the sea front. From the start of Atlantics, the ocean is potently present beside and beyond the film’s dusty urban setting.
Souleiman is in love with Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) and she with him. Unfortunately for them both, Ada is about to be married by her family to Omar (Babacar Sylla), a wealthy businessman – though not as wealthy as the tycoon Ndiaye (Diankou Sembene), the developer behind the tower project, who’s better at making money than he is at paying wages. Doubly desperate, Souleiman sees no alternative to leaving Senegal. With other labourers, he embarks on a sea voyage to Spain, to try and make a living there. In spite of her reluctance, Ada’s marriage goes ahead. When her friends, chief among them Dior (Nicole Sougou) and Fanta (Aminata Kane), see the garish opulence of the home she’ll now be living in, they can’t understand the bride’s lack of enthusiasm. One of them points out that it doesn’t matter if Ada doesn’t love her husband: for a large part of the year, Omar will be away on business in Europe (like, yet so unlike, Souleiman). On the night of the wedding day, a fire breaks out in the house. Before the newlyweds even reach the white satin marriage bed, it’s been fire-damaged beyond repair.
Ada’s fears for Souleiman’s safety on the crossing to Spain are soon vindicated: news arrives that the pirogue carrying the workmen has been lost at sea. Yet when the local police chief (Ibrahima Mbaye) assigns Issa (Amadou Mbaye), his star young detective, to investigate what appears to be the arson attack on Omar’s home, Issa immediately suspects that Souleiman is responsible – that he’s never left Dakar at all. In the event, Issa isn’t entirely wrong about this; in the meantime, disturbing things continue to happen. The first fire isn’t the last, and it’s suggested these are cases not of arson but of spontaneous combustion. Issa, who had an unexplained fainting fit the day before he started to look into the fire at Omar’s, starts to suffer symptoms of fever and sickness, as does Ada’s enthusiastically westernised friend Fanta.
The oppositions in Atlantics – between haves and have nots, acquisitiveness and true love, the new surfaces and abiding predispositions of the culture described by Mati Diop – are clear enough. (Part of the dialogue is in French, a larger part in Wolof.) In one typically expressive shot, Diop shows a woman in traditional dress, balancing a basket of shopping on her head, walking away from camera, while Ada, designer handbag on her arm, walks towards it. Yet the heroine is far from being a liberated young woman. Her beauty increases her saleability, in a transaction between her parents and Omar that takes no account of her own feelings. Ada and Souleiman are kindred spirits not only in the mutual attraction between them but also in their different forms of servitude.
Issa eventually solves the case (and, in so doing, cures his own sickness). The ghosts of those lost at sea have returned to Dakar to possess, as zombies, the white-eyed living. Issa could be said to use rational detective work to discover an irrational explanation of events but there’s a teleological side to it too. The possessors get their own back on the unscrupulous Ndiaye, forced by the spirits of his workforce not only to bring a load of cash to a graveyard, where zombified local women count the unpaid wages, but also, through the voices of the dead men speaking through these women, to ‘Dig our graves’. As Ndiaye cluelessly goes to work with a pickaxe, they laugh derisively that he doesn’t know how to deal ‘real work’.
In presenting, very singularly, working people of both sexes joining forces, the graveyard scenes resonates with the shared subjugation of Ada and Souleiman. The latter, though, continues to stand apart from his fellow workers, post-mortem as in life. His preoccupation is not with Ndiaye but with Ada. She receives a text, apparently from Souleiman, asking her to meet him in secret one night. When a knock comes on the door, she opens it to find Issa there. She runs to the window to warn Souleiman that the police are there to arrest him. But in the next shot it’s not Issa but Souleiman who’s there with Ada. The young construction worker has possessed the detective. When both have come to understand this, Ada and Issa spend a night together. He leaves her sleeping, goes back to work and confirms to his boss that the case can be closed. He does so simply by placing on the commissioner’s desk a USB stick, which contains visual evidence of the zombification that’s been happening.
Through that memory stick, Mati Diop wittily and succinctly stays true to the reality of the supernatural in Atlantics. Ada concludes the film more portentously. After assuring her lost love that ‘I’ll always taste the salt of your body in the sweat of mine’, she turns to camera and tells the audience that, ‘Last night will stay with me to remind me who I am and show me who I will become. Ada, to whom the future belongs. I am Ada’. While it would be nice to think the future belongs to the Adas and Souleimans of this world, rather than the Ndiayes, it’s hard to see, in view of the grim economic realities that Diop has critiqued, how this could actually happen – short of the worldwide yoking of a longing for social justice with the realisation of buried cultural mythology to bring about change. Diop’s harnessing the two things makes Atlantics an intriguing parable but Ada’s peroration is an OTT way of ending the film on an upbeat note.
This is a wonderful film to look at, a description that also applies to Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the other 2019 release shot by Claire Mathon (her numerous earlier credits include Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake). The visualising of Ndiaye’s tower as sinister yet spectral, dominating the skyline of a ghost city, is especially apt and powerful. Almost needless to say, Mathon’s seascapes are variously expressive too. I assume Mati Diop singularised the title this time around to distinguish her feature from her short but the pluralised English translation does better convey the several potential connotations of the title – the Atlantic Ocean, the sense of migrants as people both at sea and seeking a new world, even the idea of an enduring, deep-as-the-ocean love between Ada and Souleiman. Some of the widespread critical enthusiasm for Atlantics has compared it with the oeuvre of Claire Denis, who gave Mati Diop her big break as an actress. The comparison amounts to damning with faint praise: Diop’s absorbing and original film is much superior to any Denis work that I know.
3 December 2019
