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.
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