“My characters rarely find themselves where they want to be in the world: there is always somewhere to escape from, to return to, or to conquer by means of the imagination.” –Mati Diop1
The characters who inhabit the short films of French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, like objects in a lost and found, are bound together by a shared state of unmoored-ness. They drift – until another transient comes along and their wavering paths converge for a moment. Sometimes the effect of the resulting relationship is enough to alter the atmosphere of the space around them, as if one person had been skating along a sheet of ice and the added weight of a partner is enough to crack it. Once transformed, these spaces do not recover, and so the final images of Diop’s films often evoke uncertainty and inconclusiveness. The bonds she portrays are self-contained universes, tethered in place by the traces they leave behind.
Lost: In inexperience
Vanina of Snow Canon (2011), occupies the space that appears after teenage curiosity but before full participation. In a dark vacation home with walls panelled in homogenous slats of wood – likely vacant but for ski trips – she circles around her sexuality with adolescent uncertainty. Things r hot with Simon, she texts a friend about a young man who has coolly denied her a cigarette. He is, by the way, her babysitter, who has been tasked to watch over Vanina while her parents attend a funeral. Frustrated by Simon, her hunger for experience releases itself through other, more accessible channels: she furtively pushes down on the pet rabbit lying on her stomach, reads through the risqué texts of another babysitter, and lives vicariously through her friend’s virtually relayed summer flirtationships, counselling and egging her on through messages that feel lifted from a television script. Just listen to your <3 girl.2
Found: In the French Alps
Heavy-lidded Mary Jane (the aforementioned other babysitter) appears to Vanina at a pivotal point in her girlhood, guiding her through her first non-speculative sexual experiences. Neither Mary Jane or Vanina want to be where they are – Vanina dons a bathing suit to tan in the chalet’s depressing living room, protesting the darkness by refusing to acknowledge it, and Mary Jane agonises over a conflict with her American boyfriend that distance prevents her from resolving. Both exist on different planes of sexual experience and the woman with far more of it, Mary Jane, is in a position of authority. Her greater level of acquaintance with sexuality, and therefore her probable ability to better separate it from emotion, does not stop her from turning to Vanina as a source of physical comfort for her pain. Diop approaches their relationship via a filmic language that lifts it from realism; by elevating it to the surreal, she renders the attraction between a babysitter and her charge a nebulous daydream and therefore just avoids the questionable ethics of romanticising it. It’s harder to question that of which you cannot be sure. Mary Jane could almost be a fantasy: in one shot we see her as Vanina must, as an enchantress, her golden headdress and shimmering scarf telegraphing exoticism. Both women are white (or white passing), and so the image of an au pair with a cliched American name decorated in distinctly non-western makeup and textiles denotes the call of the unexplored – unexplored bodies, unexplored age differences, unexplored cultures – which can be heard by both an admiring girl and a babysitter touring France.
The landscapes of Snow Canon are a canvas for Vanina’s longing, reflecting unsatiated desire. Her glances travel from Mary Jane’s cocked foot to the curve under the seam of her shorts, while Diop’s camera crawls over the terrain of the Alps, stubbornly sticking to craggy detail and rarely opening up to the expected wide shot of the mountains in all their glory. We’re meant to be left wanting more. As Vanina watches Mary Jane change into a dress she has given her, her throat twitches and her lips part involuntarily. Later, when they visit an eerie, neon-lit cave, the two almost lose each other in the darkness. In both scenes, there is the sense of trembling on an edge, being both beckoned by and apprehensive about what lies beyond it.
As Mary Jane departs, she finally kisses Vanina and Vanina kisses back: a passionate, eyes-closed goodbye kiss that leaves the younger girl looking downward. Afterwards, when Vanina opens the electric blinds of her family’s chalet, a light beam cuts through the darkness in which most of the film has occurred as if to purge the last remnants of desire. Vanina is left to clean up – but she doesn’t clean, only rearranges. She lifts abandoned sweaters from the floor only to drape them elsewhere or empties one container into another, tidying up but not eliminating the traces of the previous days.3 Mary Jane has made Vanina’s dreamed-for eroticism a reality, reshaping her physical and mental landscape with an unexpected experience that is heartbreakingly real, especially when foregrounded by the adolescent hypotheticals she texts to her friend. Are u gonna sleep with a guy?
Lost: In a doomed film
Big in Vietnam is about a film crew attached to an aimless adaptation of Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Henriette and her son, Mike. They plan to set their version of the story in Vietnam – and the film would have potential as an interesting exploration of cultures intertwined by colonialism, if only the people involved with the movie gave a shit. In the opening shot, a woman (whom we later understand is Henriette) explains the film to one of its lead actors, emphasising that the crux of the piece is in the sensuality and passion of the relationship it depicts. After this scene Diop plunges forward in time to the project’s production: the subsequent shot shows fully costumed actors running lines in between takes. They lounge in lush grass, their body language decidedly spiritless. Diop’s attention stresses the contrast between intended and achieved passion; the camera flits away from the speaking actor to focus on one resting her chin in her hand, another nibbling his finger absentmindedly.
The project slackens, and then falls apart. In another revealing edit, operatic music plays over a long take of the silent crew recording the noises particular to the dense forest that serves as their set. The singer’s grandiose voice prevents us from accessing the intimate sounds of the environment even as they’re being mechanically captured, while accentuating the crew’s disconnectedness – whether stabbing microphones into the air or sitting elbow-to-knee, the crew members look laughably unengaged. The opulent score swells. Sao, the romantic lead from the beginning of the film, disappears after staring at himself in the mirror, perhaps trying to access something internal which he realises he cannot. He wanders off into the forest.
To salvage their shoot after Sao’s abandonment, the project’s director Henriette and her son/collaborator Mike meet with their producer. He insists, tersely, that they shoot a climactic sex scene without Sao. Though Mike seems too green to resist, Henriette’s experience treats Sao’s loss as terminal, and so she too forgoes the project to wander in the wake of its dying star.
Found: with a man haunted by memories of home
Both Henriette and Sao discover authenticity through aimlessness. Diop’s films scoff at attempts to generate emotionally transcendental experiences, positing instead that we can only discover spiritual truth after surrendering its pursuit. Henriette forges a spontaneous, sensual connection (which her film, despite collective action and a budget, fails to evoke) with a weary stranger, singing with him in a neighborhood restaurant over a metallic karaoke soundtrack. Diop cuts back to the film crew (helmed by a clueless Mike), waiting for a fog machine to heat up so it can buoy the atmosphere of their bedroom scene, as Henriette and the stranger sing, unaided by special effects or even reliable microphones, with wistful feeling. This shared moment feels more precious because of the lack of attention being paid to it, as opposed to the relationship portrayed in Henriette’s abandoned film, whose bland, scripted generalities seem unworthy of their lush backdrops and the hawkish gazes of the crew.
Diop’s films scoff at attempts to generate emotionally transcendental experiences, positing instead that we can only discover spiritual truth after surrendering its pursuit.
The medium itself informs how we perceive Henriette’s encounter. Coarse, documentarian shots capture her and the stranger when we next see them strolling along a dusty, crowded beach after roaming all night. Diop chooses the same type of footage to show Sao’s never-ending traipse through the jungle, lending both wanderings naturalism and coveted authenticity. Henriette and her unnamed partner circumvent beached sunbathers, the man excavating memories of his beloved Vietnam until silence falls – as if he has been pulled into his recollections – and the two simply walk. The camera is not completely faithful to its subjects. It floats upwards to join a ferris wheel car or descends down into the foliage, introducing another element of serendipitous discovery. When Diop returns to close-ups of Henriette and the stranger’s seaside meandering, she does so using both jump cuts and a background so overexposed that it bleaches all detail to leave us disorientated. As with Sao’s journey, we have no sense of how long or how far the pair have gone, something which induces the kind of ambiguous uneasiness that comes after an event so affecting that it merits the question: “what next?”
Lost: between states of mortality
Atlantiques opens with the description of a dream. Through a recorded retelling, a young Senegalese man, Serigne, lingers on a vision he had while sleeping fitfully in a boat en route to Spain. He recalls waking just as his dreamt-of mother reaches out with the tea she’s sugared for him, waking with the pain of an ‘almost’. The experience of weathering the tumultuous waves, he says, must be “like the feeling you get when you’re trapped in a falling building. You wonder where you are until the impact.” Six minutes later, after watching Serigne and two friends (Cheikh and Alpha) discuss his need to leave Senegal and his failed attempt to do so, Diop makes a spatio-temporal leap to show his other friends at work burying him. They place his stone and sprinkle final handfuls of dirt over his grave, and question the exact date of his death – timelines are tenuous when one drowns at sea. Serigne’s death is shown to us as suddenly, deftly, as if Diop herself were waking us from a dream, or allowing a suspended building to crash to the ground. Once oriented, the Serigne we watched crouched in respite from the darkness becomes a shadowy visitor hosted by the night, perhaps only a trace of himself.
Found: where darkness converges with the edge of a campfire’s reach
To leave a trace is to have existed, to have been real. The image Diop chooses to pair with Serigne’s revisited dream is that of skeletal strips of light dancing over rusted gears. Pairing Serigne’s voice with these images creates a strange, linked effect – the unexpected material fuses with the personal, and the gears could almost be playing his story. If the film pronounces Serigne dead, it also memorialises him in artefact. As the locus of Serigne, Alpha, and Cheikh’s interaction, the flickering fire itself operates only at a distance; it throws faces into relief, heats bodies, but cannot be directly touched. A misty image of an empty pirogue, bobbing on the surrounding water, builds on a filmic vocabulary consisting of remnants, as does Serigne’s restlessness. “Man, we’re here talking but my mind is elsewhere,” he tells Cheikh after the latter proposes that the worst outcome of an attempt to emigrate is being deported after reaching your destination. The pain associated with journeys partially completed, false victories and friends half departed is acute. Sometimes, Serigne says, “I even wonder what I’m doing here.” He swears he’ll keep flinging himself into the hellish odyssey across the ocean. He survived it, wishes to return to it, consents to die in it and will. He’ll defend it, too: “The ocean,” Serigne says to Alpha, “has no borders.” “Yet it offers no branches,” replies Alpha. “Nothing to hold on to.”
Atlantiques, Snow Canon and Big in Vietnam, all offer something to hold on to even after they end and memory must suffice. They give us moments of life so concrete that they bruise on impact, but slide through our fingers when we stop reaching, precious and painful in their fluidity. These moments leave traces which reiterate their existence and importance but emphasise their defining absence – invoking, to use Serigne’s words, an “interrupted dream”. Whether Diop’s films shows us the dream or the interruption, I don’t know.
Bessie Rubinstein is a writer based in New York.
This essay initially appeared in Another Gaze 03. You can buy all print issues here. We are completely unfunded and our editors unpaid so if you like what you read you can support us here.
1. Picard, Andrea, “In the Realm of the Senses: Mati Diop on Mille Soleils,” CinemaScope. 2. Vanina, a native French speaker, reads these texts out loud in a halting English; the linguistic gap mirrors the gap between her lived experience and the content of the messages. 3. The most quotidian reminders of loss can be the most painful; in her book The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of the Eulogy, Julia Cooper proposes that we trust “the banality of grief because something honest lies in its wrinkles and creases,” what she thinks of, “to borrow one of [Roland Barthes’s] lines, as ‘the lineaments of truth.’”2
