Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
A silent strobe light, a trash-covered street, and a relentless ocean—these are some of the images that anchor Atlantics, a Sengalese film headed to Netflix on November 29 following a two-week theatrical run. From first-time feature director Mati Diop, it’s part ghost story, part social commentary, but ultimately a tragic romance about a young woman named Ada whose true love dies at sea.
Atlantics (or Atlantique, in French) was acquired by the streaming service after the film premiered in May at Cannes Film Festival, where it took home the Grand Prix, the second-most prestigious award the festival has to offer, so it’s no surprise that my theater was packed at the New York Film Festival screening in September. Dior—a 37-year-old French-Senegalese filmmaker and actor also known for starring in 2008’s 35 Shots of Rum—opens her film on a group of young men in the suburbs of Dakar. The men have been working tirelessly for months constructing a new high-rise building without pay, and when they demand their rich boss cough up their cash, they’re told they’ll have to wait. One young man named Souleiman (actor Ibrahima Traoré) is particularly upset by this news. You don’t need to speak his native language (Wolof) to feel his distress and desperation—the intensity with which he stares into the Atlantic ocean borders on suicidal. He distracts himself with his girlfriend, Ada (Mame Bineta Sane). The two are Romeo and Juliet, young star-crossed lovers, but forced into secrecy because Ada is engaged to be married to a man she doesn’t love, but who does have a lot of money.
Here, the film shifts the point of view to Ada. Ada is miserable, not just because she’s engaged to marry a man she doesn’t love, but because her life is so completely outside of her control. She clings to small acts of rebellion, like sneaking off with girls that her religious best friend dubs “sluts.” But one night at a makeshift club in an abandoned building on the coastline is not fun at all when the girls learn that the boys—including Souleiman—have embarked on a dangerous journey to cross the ocean and sail to Spain, hoping to find paying work. Not long after, Ada hears Souleiman’s body has been found, washed up in a fisherman’s net.
Then strange, supernatural things start to happen. An obscenely large, pristine bed meant for Ada and her rich fiancé Omar (Babacar Sylla) spontaneously lights on fire. Witnesses claim they saw Souleiman there. The detective assigned to the arson case, Issa (Amadou Mbow), falls ill. I won’t spoil more than that, but there are a few fun, though sometimes silly-looking, zombie effects thrown in.
Atlantics is a continuation of Diop’s 2009 award-winning short film of the same name, about a Senegalese man who journeys by sea to Spain in search of a better life. For the feature, Diop shifted the focus to the internal life of the love he left behind, and this part she does to great success. The real triumph of Atlantics is not the ghosts of men that come back to haunt the one percent of Senegal, but Ada’s quiet grief—grief for Souleiman, which she isn’t allowed to show, and grief for her own life, which was never hers to begin with. There are passing references to Ada’s struggle with her Muslim faith and her country’s traditional values—she doesn’t wear mini-skirts like her friends at the club, but neither does she always wear her headscarf like her best friend and mother. Later, when she is feeling braver, she lets her outspoken friend Dior (Nicole Sougou) braid her hair. Again and again, she is told to stop moping and act like a good wife for Omar. In one poignant and degrading scene, her fiance’s family forces her to take a “virginity test”—a practice decried by human rights organizations that is still common in Middle Eastern and African countries, in which a doctor probes women for the presence of a hymen.
Not everything works. At times, the film feels unfocused, torn between Ada’s story as a woman fighting to be heard in a country that oppresses her gender, and Souleiman’s story as a working-class man in a country that oppresses his class. Those are stories and identities that surely intersect, but Diop never quite pulls it off. Some of the gender, religious, and sexual politics feel outdated. One uncomfortable scene at the film’s end could be considered sexual assault, but is portrayed as romantic. But Diop films it all beautifully—muted, but finding something to glitter in nearly every shot from the club lights on Ada’s desolate face, the sweat on Issa’s brow, or the ever-present ocean. An eerie score from Kuwaiti composer Fatima Al Qadiri emphasizes the lover’s anguish and longing, as do vibrant performances from Sane and Traoré. In the end, Atlantics is a well-shot, elegant film bursting with compassion for characters who don’t often get it.
