Banel & Adama review – gorgeous but frustrating cinema as fairytale

Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama (Mamadou Diallo) are a beautiful couple, introduced on the arid plains of Senegal, clad in yellow and red respectively. They float through their day’s work of cow-herding in a harmonious, almost dreamlike state. Banel closes her eyes against the blistering sun, hiding from reality by finding meaning in the flashing lights, or phosphenes, left behind in her vision. In this opening sequence, the pair exist in a montage of almost stock videos, in primary colours and lens flare, experiencing the world in high definition.

Nothing can stay golden forever, alas, and as they come home to their village, they find social, spiritual and superstition barriers to their independence as a couple. We learn that Banel had to marry Adama’s older brother, Yero, and that their love story only came to be after Yero drowned in a well. Adama, as the remaining male heir, has been trained to become chief, but as he rejects the role in favour of his wife’s dreams to move away.

As such, an atmosphere of unrest in the community intensifies. In Islam, when someone passes away we do not say ​“Rest In Peace,” instead the translation is, ​“We are all from God and to Him we return”. While it does not mean reincarnation, it does mean birth isn’t the beginning, nor is death the end, and everything is God’s will. The overwhelming nature of this sentiment comes through in the small Muslim Senegalese village in which Banel & Adama is set. As a drought hits, the rainbow palette of the start is replaced with the washed-out white of sun-bleached, dried and cracked earth, and the village questions whether the power couple are being tested by God for their bold decision to stake out a new life elsewhere.

It takes everything for Banel to remain steadfast, and she uses their names, the title of the film, as a mantra for strength, while others, like Banel’s twin brother Racine, seek refuge in the Qur’an, touting ​“reason over heart”. So the pressure to fold is overwhelming. Khady Mane is magnetic on screen, narrowing her eyes at any obstacles in her path, from pestering older women asking why she doesn’t have children a year into her marriage, to critters (mostly birds and lizards) that she catapults into oblivion without blinking for disturbing her peace.

While beautiful, the impression left by Banel & Adama is confusing. Like the fairy tale Adama tells at the start of the film about a fisherman who can talk to sirens, the ending feels truncated. That moment in the script feels like a microcosm of the whole film, where initially impactful motifs remain undeveloped and don’t lead to any higher significance.

For instance, the repeated symbol of a child who seemingly stares into Banel’s soul everywhere she turns, gets more frustratingly meaningless over the course of the film. An admirable overarching theme of Banel remaining triumphant and true to herself is pushed to exhaustion, making resentment fester for an otherwise respectable sub-90-minute runtime. Life or cinema doesn’t have to be satisfactory, but here, lovely details feel discarded or lazily left up to the viewer’s imagination, rather than open-ended for wider interpretation.