Despite winning the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Mati Diop’sAtlanticswent underappreciated in a stacked release year. Perhaps the film was too political, or too dreamlike and sensory in its aesthetics. It is difficult to defineAtlanticsas a science fiction fable, a romance, a noir thriller, or a drama, not because the film transits safely through these genres, but because they all come loose in a contemplative and melancholy plot that is sustained precisely by its strangeness. Diop offers instead a skin-deep, didactic disquisition on the socio-religious complications of modern-day Senegal,told as an allegorical ghost story.
The film begins by setting an expressionist depiction of the suburb of Dakar against a micro, social realist scene of workers demanding wages. The local bourgeoisie, like all others, have fed on the capital’s poverty, squeezing labor out of the less wealthy and creating a community within an increasingly trapped people. InAtlantics, the characters are irretrievably conditioned by the imposition of money— some rejoice to have it; others dream of the ostentation of their possession. Awild capitalist logicis immediately established. We witness an uprising of subjects who have not received four months of wages, and left with no other option, “choose” instead to take a perilous voyage across the Atlantic, to seek work in Spain. Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore) is one of these workers, and he quickly cedes the leading role to his beloved Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), who is promised to another man. Soon, the narrative, initially conducted by a masculine look, reveals a deep feminine perspective.
Atlanticsis Social Commentary Told Using The Fantastic
Atlanticstargets the conjuncture of refugees with an expressive distancing. Instead of presenting the temporality of the crew, the director first invests in doubt, in the lack of information that amplifies the anguish of those who remain, i.e. in the power of returning spirits that “possess” the women with whom they kept close ties. This nocturnal march that, in a way, merges the men and women forces, could be best read as an insurrection fueled by an amplified, post-mortem outrage. The text’s emotional register, to be both ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, is expertly balanced by Diop’s camera, sometimes sweeping into the action— the over-the-shoulder, frenetic movements of the men’s anger; the touches between Ada and her women friends— and is permeated bythe sensual and hypnotic music(mimicking the sounds of waves) of Fatima Al-Qadiri, even when the script calls for dissonance. Diop practically demands that the viewer be affected by the feverish state that overtakes many of the characters; her aesthetic features overlap with classical language, andAtlantics' great charm lies precisely in this subjectivity.It is not that Diop is unable to find a tone or angle for her story, but that the constant change reflects the upheaval that Ada lives inside as a person, and outside as a married and then repudiated Senegalese woman.
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Diop Poetically Portrays the Sea
The omnipresent sea—also used in the film as a specter for unknown destiny—transmits a projection of the interiority of the protagonists. Recallingthe elliptical style of Marguerite Duras’s cinema, Diop privileges the image over dialogue: the eyes weigh more than the words, the green lights that pass over Ada illuminate her inner being, and the movements of the Atlantic reveal those of the soul. By anchoring her narrative within this deep naturalism, Diop prevents the viewer from being completely seized by the more fantastic, genre-bent tropes of her script. The beauty ofAtlanticsis in how Diop highlights this dichotomy by using different techniques: the color palette of her sea compositions, yellow and pink by day and subterranean blue at night; and in the mystery of the film, where the director’s most realistic aesthetic is punctuated by phantasmagorical elements. This bifurcation by Diop gives the film its unique quality—of being a portrait of a generation, but one that is not intended to be its definitive vision. Diop’s gaze isn’t intrusive but observational, lingering on moments of extreme intimacy, like that between Ada and her lost love, inhabiting the corporeal form of another, as they kiss and sway in tandem one last time.
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Atlanticsis a Feminist Fable
Atlantics’ conclusion lends itself to a feminist reading. The loneliness Ada faces when Souleiman leaves never finishes defining her, nor does her marriage and repudiation. Ada’s personhood, like her already established and independent friend, Dior (Nicole Sougou), is never limited to being “who was left behind”—they are consequently the only female characters not susceptible to possession.
Perhaps, then, at its core,Atlanticsis a love story: first between Ada and Souleiman, then between Ada and her relationships with other women, and finally between Ada and her quest for identity. Romantic love, friendship love, and self-love. At the end of the film,in a camera break of the fourth wall, Ada reaffirms herself in front of a mirror as the waves sound in the background. The waves that took her great love from her, now seem a comfort to her. It is the gesture of a woman who knows herself to inherit a great tradition, both spiritual and cultural, and whose vision and call for self-determination help us to better perceive both the needs of our time and our presence in the world.
