Banel & Adama – first-look review

The names Banel and Adama echo through­out Rama­ta-Toulaye Sy’s debut fea­ture like an incan­ta­tion. Ghost­ly voic­es whis­per them, a hand scrawls them in a note­book over and over; they are rarely sep­a­rat­ed as words or, in fact, as peo­ple. A young cou­ple in a remote Sene­galese vil­lage, they are both obsessed with and haunt­ed by their togetherness.

With its bal­let­ic chore­og­ra­phy of per­for­mance and stat­uesque visu­al approach, Sy’s film is a work of remark­able com­po­si­tion. Through often sta­t­ic and poised imagery, clos­er to pho­to­graph­ic work, the film­mak­er and DoP Amine Berra­da play with notions of struc­ture to con­vey the restric­tive tra­di­tions of Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama’s (Mamadou Dial­lo) home. Banel, reluc­tant to have chil­dren and eager to work in the fields with Adama, rebels against the norms of the vil­lage where the elders would rather she ful­fil her sup­posed duties as a woman.

Adama strug­gles too, refus­ing to inher­it the title of vil­lage chief that his lin­eage grants and his moth­er desires for him. Yet, where what Adama feels is clos­er to guilt — he fears the drought dev­as­tat­ing their land is a holy pun­ish­ment for his refusal — Banel is tor­ment­ed by graver suf­fer­ing. Los­ing Adama to the ways of the vil­lage would mean total destruc­tion for a woman intent on break­ing free.

As the vil­lage elders’ grip on Banel and Adama’s fate tight­ens, Banel grows more and more frag­ile. Her twin broth­er tells her he has always been the twin of rea­son while she has been the twin of heart, but, in the blis­ter­ing heat of the drought, that heart grows tox­ic. She is des­per­ate to live alone with Adama in a house sub­merged by sand; he does what he can to res­cue the prop­er­ty and restore it, but the task is Sisyphean.

Their pained dig­ging through the dunes reflects the fight between ded­i­ca­tion and futil­i­ty that defines their social rebel­lions. Lat­er, Sy’s sub­tle sto­ry­telling hints at the vio­lence that has long exist­ed inside Banel, the vio­lence that may be the very basis of her rela­tion­ship with Adama. A sniper with a sling­shot, she seeks out lizards to kill in the desert and then burns their bod­ies in a campfire.

Vis­cer­al sound design com­ple­ments the rigid­i­ty of the images, mark­ing the fever­ish decay of Banel’s men­tal state with­in the con­fines of her cir­cum­stances. Sy’s com­men­tary on the chang­ing role of women with­in this com­mu­ni­ty and the pres­sures of tra­di­tion works effec­tive­ly in tan­dem with the more abstract genre ele­ments of the film, bal­anc­ing the lofti­er, more spec­tral design with ground­ed narrative.

Every move­ment, every shot is deployed with such con­fi­dence and the film­mak­er draws com­pelling per­for­mances from both Mane, grace­ful even in all of Banel’s dis­tress, and Dial­lo, regal yet soft in equal mea­sure. It’s all an impres­sive sign of Sy’s for­mal rigour and deft evo­ca­tion of place, but the film works on sim­pler terms, too — at the heart of Banel & Adama is the cos­mic love sto­ry of two peo­ple who are meant to be togeth­er, no mat­ter what it takes.