Atlantics

Profiling the French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, whose Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes, Maya Binyam observes that the filmmaker “can conscript nearly anyone into a collaborative mode of speech.” “[Audience] members finished at least two of her sentences” during an appearance at the New York Film Festival. Diop, however, “invites the participation,” and extends it to the non-professional cast she worked with on Atlantics, who, she says, need to “know more about the characters than I do.” This theory of collaboration results in fitful bouts of inarticulation, reflected on screen as fever—but also in a peculiar authority with matters beyond the grave.

Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) is a ghost before he dies. Denied at first four months of wages—earned building a luxury tower that snubs the shanties of Dakar—and then denied Ada (Mame Bineta Sane)—who’s betrothed to a rich man but is the love of Souleiman’s life—he has nothing left for him in Senegal. Ada, one night, finds their hangout empty—green lasers skim the void. “They got on a boat” is the only explanation she needs; we never see it but experience the voyage through her posture in bed: Souleiman’s death is pronounced in a dream. They didn’t make it far enough to be refugees.

If Souleiman presides over the movie like an angel of justice, his haunting passivity has an earthly rebuttal—it animates Sane’s long bones. Ada is no princess and seems irritated by the marriage that will make her a queen. I mistook Ada’s sullenness for petulance, at first, because Diop is in no hurry to explain that, in places where 17-year-old brides are subjected to virginity tests, unspoken but unhidden grievance is the only recourse they have.

Though the storytelling can be impassive, it is also shockingly uncoercive; and there is a toughness verging on bravery in how Diop hews to the limits of her characters’ experience, to the sexism and corruption, the dust heaps and dishabille that pervade Dakar and only break on the ocean, where they lapse into mystery. It seems too obvious to admit that it’s a fairy tale, with a damsel in distress imprisoned in the castle of an unloving suitor, and yet it is not obvious at all—even as that latent familiarity must partly account for the movie’s presence at Cannes and on Netflix. Perhaps it is not obvious because, instead of working these parallels into the refugee crisis, Diop simply found that they were there, and stumbled on the eternal.

However she got to it I think it shows she has talent: a rare and beautiful mix of self-effacement and intuition. (I think it is well to bear in mind that Atlantics is her first feature-length film.) And though, from the perspective of the Hollywood-soaked brain, Diop makes a few storytelling gaffes—such as withholding how one character gets out of handcuffs—she communes with the dead with an élan that would make any necromancer blush.

In keeping with the fairy-tale framing, nobody seems to notice that the women’s eyes cloud over—like an approaching front—whenever the men who died with Souleiman at sea possess their bodies. These zombies aren’t seeking flesh or revenge—only their due from the builder who stiffed the workers when they were alive. They don’t threaten lives, only property.

And then there is a Issa (Amadou Mbow), who Souleiman ventriloquizes to get to Ada: to bless her with the love and confidence to seek a better life. By losing her virginity to the man she loves, she gains a womanhood that her society must reckon with. Ada is no longer property to be bartered.

Issa, by contrast, is an up-and-coming detective with the local police force, which means he is as brusquely corrupt as the rest. In a twist that another film might exploit for comedy, he turns into a one-man Valjean and Javert. But, for Diop, there’s an odd and erotic pathos when Souleiman enters the cop without his consent, as if Issa’s very soul were sweating out of him.

This process springboards into one of the most poetic car chases I’ve ever seen. At last realizing the source of the tropical disease he’s succumbing to night after night, Issa, wasting away in traffic, struggles to outrun the sun as it penetrates the waves—he perceives that the spell is chasing him from across the sea, as if borne by the wind. At different ports on the same vast and fearsome ocean, I remind myself, are Chiron and Freddie Quell.