Atlantics by Mati Diop: a ghostly love story
Where the white scum blends with the grey sand and the dull sky, where the waves of the wild Atlantic Ocean crushes on the beach of Dakar, a young girl named Ada lay with her lover Souleiman. “You’re always looking at the ocean, you’re not even looking at me” says the 17-year-old Black girl. Telling her that she is the most beautiful, the young boy gently kisses her before staring back at the ocean. He is an unpaid construction worker of a modern tower on the coast. She, due to a rich man, will soon be married. Secretly, they are in love with each other, but one day, Souleiman does not come to their appointment… Interspersed with numerous long and delightful scenes of the ocean, the movie follows step by step the journey of the young Ada, between cultural tension, societal issues, and mystical disturbance.
Born in Paris in 1982, Mati Diop is a talented young French-Senegalese director. Daughter of the famous Senegalese musician Wasis Diop, and niece of the film director Djibril Diop Mambéty, she produced her first short film in 2004. Two years later, she enrolled at Le Fresnoy, the National Studio of Contemporary Arts. There, she imagined in 2009 a 15 minutes experimental documentary following two young Senegalese on their dangerous boat crossing to Europe. The movie won the Tiger Award for Short Films of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was awarded by 3 other festivals. Growing up in France, she used to be attracted by the American and Western culture as all the young people of her age. In a 2019 France Info interview, she explained that “we (Occidentals) grow up in a world that pushes us to value that culture more than African one”. Largely inspired by the strength of her father’s music and uncle’s film she was always proud of that Africa. Shortly she realised that her white culture was totally overriding her own Africanness. She had to participate in the reconstruction of a new African imaginary. Infusing her own delicate approach in each of her 5 acclaimed short films, she soon began to work on her first long format inspired by her previous documentary Atlantics.
Searching for Souleiman, Ada decides to go to her friend’s bar on the edge of the beach. All the girls are reunited, and Ada learns that boys are gone to the sea. She tries to call him, but falls on his voicemail. Leaning her back on the wall, a green strobe lights run over her thinking face. The moon is almost new. In the morning, under a grey sky, Ada walks back home along the beach, looking at the sea out of the corner of one's eye. Without making any noise, Ada enters her room by the window, lights a candle and starts to pray. Holding her hands on the chest as if she had physical pain, she weeps quietly.
At the same time, a strange fever grips the women of the neighbourhood. The complex love story turns suddenly fantastic when voodoo spirits of the men lost at sea, enter each night the bodies of Dakar inhabitants in search of revenge.Threatening the owner of the construction company of the modern tower on the cost, the mystical inhabited women with white eyes ask for the money the workers did not get. Before forcing the property mogul to dig their graves so that their spirits may rest peacefully. In parallel, the lovers' relentless search for each other remains complete. Possessing the body of a young detective, Souleiman finally spends one last heartbreaking night with Ada before peacefully going away. Over a long shot of a dusky-pink sky extending over the ocean, Suleiman's voice whispers, “I felt your weeping dragging me to shore. Your eyes never left me, they were there with me”.
The film premiered at Cannes, won the Grand Prize and Mati Diop became the first Black woman director to compete at the eminent festival. With only two scenes showing the lovers together, this movie is definitely the most delicate love story of the year. Reminiscent of how omnipresent departed loved ones can be, the movie explores the problem of the mass emigration of young Africans. Emigrants do so at a great personal cost and only when they are deprived of a life at home. The whole youth lost at sea trying to reach Europe, this phantom youth, haunted and deeply marked Mati Diop. She personally met someone who did this terrifying journey and she decided to make a movie about it. Criticising the wealthy elites in Senegal and beyond, the property mogul of the film finally confronts the social impact of his greedy behavior. Worker’s mistreatment, forced marriage, shipwreck, and prostitution, the undercurrent of social critique exists harmoniously alongside the tender love and mystical story in Mati Diop’s movie.
With a highly aesthetic directorial style, she focuses her movie on the ocean. As it embodies a direct threat, a majestic enveloping framework, and at the same time a hypothetical Europe meant to hold the workers’ hopes, the waves, the water and the sky keep coming back as a subliminal message. Supported by a bewitching photography and the electronic music of the Senegalese conceptual artist Fatima Al Qadiri, the movie is an emotional, visual and sounded poem. For Diop, the use of a fantastic and poetic approach on such geopolitical and economic issues is a way to address these concerns in a different way. Poetry has the capacity to grasp things in depth she said. It speaks a language that touches the “ultra-sensitive” and resists a certain miserable and deficient vision of the African continent. Because such fantasy does not ally itself with the official discourse, the movie is not preoccupied with dispelling stereotypes. Rather, its deeply intimate narrative follows Ada in her solemn journey to adulthood.