The first film directed by a Black woman to premiere at Cannes, “Atlantics” is a haunted look at the many different victims of Africa’s refugee crisis.
I don’t know if I could have predicted the theme of this year’s New York Film Festival to be “surrealism and anticapitalism,” but here we are. After Zombi Child and with films like Bacurau coming soon, there is a lot of strange energy to the films at the festival. Atlantics is no different, a tale of the women left behind as a result of the refugee crisis in Africa.
Made in Senegal by Senegalese-French Director Mati Diop, the film made history already. Atlantics became the first film directed by a black woman to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Atlantics focuses on a young woman named Ada who deals with her upcoming marriage to land baron Omar after her true love Souleiman leaves Senegal following his company’s refusal to pay him and the other men after three months. Ada gets thrown into a deep depression, lost without her lover. Then, on the night of her wedding to Omar, she discovers her marital bed burst into flames. Witnesses identify Souleiman, despite Ada and others knowing he should theoretically be midway across the ocean.
Mame Bineta Sane as Ada in Atlantics
Writer-director Diop integrates the mystery of who is committing this and other strange crimes through a detective angle. But most of the film follows Ada, played by debut actress Mame Bineta Sane.
Sane isn’t a professional actress, and scenes asking us to follow Ada’s emotional struggle are often less engaging. But sequences that give Ada hope for her emotional future contain the most jarring material in the film. Torn between unloved-but-high status Omar and the possibly deceased true-love, Ada’s story should hit harder. But there is almost too much distance between the performance and the audience to really hit those notes. It also isn’t great that Omar is barely a character, and that the other two lead men don’t get much to do, performance-wise. Possibly-supernatural forces bring every character, and the film becomes even less easy to grasp. Yet the constant struggle and hope of those missing their loved ones are all that matters.
The visuals of Atlantics are what set it apart from anything else at the festival. From capturing a non-existant skyscraper in Dakar to some amazing sunset footage, cinematographer Claire Mathon continues her run of great visual composition (see Portrait of a Lady on Fire for more at NYFF). One location, in particular, finds blue lighting and green disco spots shining on the black skin of the stars of the movie, a breathtaking image. But it almost is a shame that subtitles get in the brain’s way. If I spoke Wolof (the dialect of Senegal), the movie might be even better. Instead, the English-speaker’s brain reads instead of absorbing the beauty. It also doesn’t help that the writing is only okay, too poetic for its own good.
The tricks that Diop pulls off work wonderfully. Time is abstract, conveyed best by phases of the ever-present moon. The haunting of the film also compounds to a metaphorical victory that feels painful nonetheless. But the film is sleepy, hypnotic in an unengaging way. It is a beautiful tour of Diop’s talents but is a little too slight at the end of the day.
The poster for Atlantics
Atlantics will be released theatrically by Netflix on November 15th, before moving online on November 29th.
