‘Atlantics’ is Haunting

In ‘Atlantics’ (2019), screenwriter and director Mati Diop takes the African migrant out of the sea and places them on the shore. She rewinds, dries the damned off and does away, for a moment, with the drowning.

Set in Senegal where a group of young men have been waiting almost four months for their pay on a construction site as excuses pile as high as a ghostly skyscraper, ‘Atlantics’ begins with the men who eventually set sail for Spain but lingers on the women left behind.

Superbly directed with the sea underscoring emotion in the wake of a desperate voyage we never see, ‘Atlantics’ – the winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – explores stories we have read in bold, prosaic headlines from the point of view of Mame Bineta Sane’s Ada.

Though sweetly in love with Ibrahima Traoré’s Souleiman, who she secretly meets at the sea, Ada is engaged to be married to someone else, as per Muslim custom. An expertly layered love, migrant and ghost story, Diop’s feature film debut imagines these intersections through the eyes of Dakar’s young women.

Those who are left behind without so much as a word and can only hope for the success of a call from Spain, others branded ‘sluts’ for not wearing hijab and many more promised to men they don’t love by fathers who insist on proof of their virginity.

A complex, surprising and supernatural treatment of a narrative often boiled down to the tragedy, in ‘Atlantics’, Diop strikes a feminist tone in which all that occurs, with the help of unscrupulous employers and pandering policeman, ultimately empowers the film’s women.

That is not to say ‘Atlantics’ forgets the men. They are literally and figuratively what haunts. A film in which the supernatural is cause for quick contrition rather than denial or hysteria, ‘Atlantics’ cleverly blends the eerie into the everyday with feverish bodies, cloudy eyes and mirrors.

At once elegiac and quietly
heroic, Diop directs an arresting two hours elevated by a captivating and evolving performance from Sane. Certainly a fantastic feature film debut for the French-born Diop, whose father is Senegalese musician Wasis Diop, ‘Atlantics’ is a must watch to hear the oft told migrant story articulated with soul, vision and a little haunting.

‘Atlantics’ (2019) is now streaming on Netflix in Wolof with English subtitles.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on social media; marthamukaiwa.com

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