Unforgettable love and loss in Senegal
Atlantique Cert TBC, 104 min
★★★★★ Dir Mati Diop
Starring Mame Sane, Amadou Aam, Ibrahima Traore, Nicole Sougou, Amina Kane, Mariama Gassama, Coumba Dieng
The white mist rising off the Senegalese coast in Atlantique, the debut feature from 36-yearold Mati Diop, gives her film a stunningly painterly look, but it’s also a man-made miasma. After New Delhi, Dakar is the second most polluted city in the world, a fact the film doesn’t have to tell us: it shows us, with a futuristic tower being built in a ramshackle suburb.
The air is contaminated by something wrong, and the site workers suffer the tragic brunt of it. Unpaid for three months by a corrupt and absent employer, they’re driven, in the case of Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), to try their luck crossing illegally to Spain on a pirogue (canoe). This is partly their story, even if their odyssey takes place wholly off screen, and it’s also the story of Ada (Mame Sane), Souleiman’s lover, who falls into a deep funk on finding that he has left, after giving her a necklace in place of a real goodbye.
After starting out as an actress with her magnetic performance in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum
(2009), the Frenchsenegalese
Diop has honed her craft on a number of well-regarded shorts, and now gets the rare privilege of a Cannes competition spot for her first feature. In fact, it’s a unique one, because she’s the first black woman ever to contend for the Palme d’or. Usually, selectors only take punts on a debut when they’re something special – and Atlantique really is. It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism and some unforgettable images, like that of a silken mattress blackened to the springs, the work of a suspected arsonist on Ada’s wedding night.
She’s been pushed by her parents into an unhappy union with rich playboy Omar (Babacar Sylla). Days before the wedding, she slips out of her bedroom window to find Souleiman at a beach club, but he has already embarked, and she realises she may never see him again.
Overarching is a serious tendresse for these characters, especially Senegal’s abandoned women. Above all, we’re left with Ada, a virginal Penelope and bartered bride, her future another story.