Atlantics

It’s heart­break­ing how casu­al­ly the live­ly, good-humoured Souleiman (Ibrahi­ma Tra­oré) makes a deci­sion that brings about the end of his young life.

Mati Diop’s stun­ning debut fea­ture Atlantics opens on a work­ers’ griev­ance at a build­ing site in Dakar, as a phal­lic glass-and-steel edi­fice looms over­head. Souleiman and his col­leagues have gone three months with­out pay, and they’re absolute­ly not going to allow that to roll over into a fourth. With a sense of resigned futil­i­ty, he doesn’t even kick up a stink. Instead he just drifts off towards home and his secret love Ada (Mame Bine­ta Sane), a young, strong woman who is due to be mar­ried (against her wish­es) to a monied entre­pre­neur she bare­ly knows.

In just a few snatched moments of screen time, Diop teas­es a boun­ti­ful future for these two illic­it love­birds. They caress and gen­tly bick­er while sur­vey­ing the breath­tak­ing beau­ty of the sea which con­nects them all the way to the hori­zon. They set an evening date for their next meet­ing, but Ada, del­i­cate­ly dolled up and ready for a night of pas­sion, dis­cov­ers that her lover has tak­en to the high seas to seek his for­tune in Spain.

It’s at this point we realise that Ada is the film’s cen­tral focus, not Souleiman, and a wist­ful dra­ma plays out in his absence. Ada is left to her fate, which includes pon­der­ing the unlike­ly return of her depart­ed beau. But on her wed­ding night, the bridal bed is set alight, and so the local con­stab­u­lary are called in to inves­ti­gate. One inspec­tor, who’s been suf­fer­ing from ran­dom bouts of ill health, is con­vinced that Souleiman is back on the scene – a sus­pi­cion con­firmed by a mys­te­ri­ous text mes­sage on Ada’s phone.

At the point where Atlantics appears set to dou­ble down on this Goth­ic-tinged roman­tic mys­tery, set against a back­drop of pover­ty and oppres­sion, it swerves off into anoth­er, more entic­ing direc­tion. Diop not only han­dles this big tonal shift with immense grace, she also man­ages to weave it back into the fab­ric of her orig­i­nal tale, because she obvi­ous­ly cares deeply about these peo­ple and their stories.

With­out giv­ing too much away, a bold super­nat­ur­al ele­ment is intro­duced, and the plot begins to address more wide­spread social ills, par­tic­u­lar­ly the sor­ry lot of wives and daugh­ters in a soci­ety still dom­i­nat­ed by the patri­archy. There’s also a sug­ges­tion that crony cap­i­tal­ism has a face, and in Sene­gal it’s def­i­nite­ly not female. In the film’s final act, bod­ies are sep­a­rat­ed from their spir­its and Diop sud­den­ly has twice the num­ber of char­ac­ters to rein in.

It’s a bal­anc­ing act that cul­mi­nates in a dole­ful, but effec­tive­ly poignant finale in which Ada receives some kind of oblique clo­sure. I hope it’s a com­pli­ment to say that it’s very easy to see how oth­er, less­er direc­tors could’ve fucked up a film like this, whether through heavy styl­i­sa­tion, overuse of music, or desta­bil­is­ing the care­ful over­tures towards genre and fantasy.

But through a host of care­ful choic­es – which relate to the pro­duc­tion design, the cos­tume choic­es, the cast­ing, the gen­tle rhythm of the nar­ra­tive and the deci­sion to not make if all look too point­ed­ly art­sy – Diop man­ages to pull of some­thing quite remarkable.