In Mati Diop’s short film Atlantiques (2009), three young Senegalese men sit around a bonfire in Dakar at night, one describing his experience trying to cross the ocean to Spain to the others. As they reflect on his dangerous journey, the firelight plays across their faces. Everything hangs in suspension. Past lives and future dreams pale against the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantique (2019), Diop’s first feature film picks up the ideas explored in Atlantiques ten years later to look at the women who stay behind; “The ones,” she notes “who wait for a brother, a lover, a son to come back”. Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) is a young construction worker in Dakar where he’s part of a crew building a luxury skyscraper. None of the men has been paid for three months, and their complaints have been ignored. In the meantime, Souleiman enjoys a romance with Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), a seemingly quiet but strong-willed seventeen-year-old. As they share a kiss in a small hideout next to the beach, they are chased away by its owner. Souleiman looks visibly shaken. He gives Ada his necklace as a gift and then they part ways.
When we learn that Ada is due to marry someone else in ten days – the wealthy, and somewhat boring, Omar (Babacar Sylla) – we understand that her relationship with Souleiman may be doomed. What follows, we think, is a story of young lovers awkwardly trying to overcome mutual obstacles to finally enjoy a life together. But when Ada learns that Souleiman has abruptly left for Spain in a pirogue with his fellow construction workers, all in search for jobs that actually pay, Atlantique becomes another story altogether. A mysterious fire in her new bedroom disrupts her and Omar’s wedding celebrations at his family’s upscale apartment. A policeman trying to solve the arson chases across Dakar in search of Souleiman, his main suspect, after hearing rumours that the bride’s former boyfriend has returned. A love story turned crime caper then shifts into the paranormal. Young women in Ada’s village are said to have been infected by djinns, malevolent spirits, and lie in their beds all day. At night, they walk in unison, barefoot and glassy-eyed, and break into the luxurious home of the community’s local businessman in protest of all the salaries he withheld. Ada receives a series of mysterious texts.
Diop’s films blend together fiction and non-fiction, the mythic and the every day. This is a way of extending generosity into a world that sorely lacks it – even at her most surreal, fantasies are not so much about a flight from the world as imagining how it could be better. Both Atlantique and the short film that precedes it are about dreams foreclosed at the very moment they are opened. Tangible dreams about gaining a better future are dampened by the knowledge that other things must therefore end, while the dream of crossing the Atlantic itself contains the possibility of death. Young men leave for Europe, and women reshuffle their lives in their wake. Through layered, textured storytelling, Diop explores what closure might look like in worlds where economic inequality and political violence have made such abrupt endings so common. Atlantique’s phantasmal turn soothes these ruptures, imagining what it could be like if people managed to tell their loved ones the thing they never said because they were too embarrassed; if shady expropriators finally met justice in a world otherwise stacked in their favour, and women got to leave their unhappy marriages on their terms.
The premiere of Atlantique at Cannes marked the first time that a film by a Black women screened in competition in the festival’s 72 years. For Diop, the revelation was an important honour and an uncomfortable reflection on the industry’s failings. It was also a source of personal stress. Her debut arrived at the Cannes accompanied by expectations different than those of any other film in her category: “When you feel your own little story meets the bigger story” she notes, “the feeling is that it doesn’t belong to you, which is quite moving really.” Atlantique’s reception is telling because it has demonstrated that in those cases, the “bigger” story can overwhelm the “smaller” one to the point of perversion or erasure. Write-ups of the film have lead with the themes of “refugee love” and the “migration crisis”, despite the fact that in Atlantique itself these ideas are scarcely presented in such predetermined forms. Much of the film’s attention is instead on the everyday lives of the women in Dakar and social constraints they face there. Sitting with Ada and Souleiman’s haunting love affair can produce a form of political understanding in itself, one that does not demand that others offer up their lives in terms that are immediately intelligible to us so that we may feel better about ourselves. The short-form Atlantiques is broader, about the experience of young Senegalese men as they travel to Europe. The feature-length Atlantique drops the plural, narrowing its range to look at how these departures have shaped the life of a particular seventeen year-old girl. As Ada gazes back at the camera, we see how the seemingly minute can be the stuff of history too.
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