July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 37T
he appearance of mati diop’s first feature,
Atlantics, in the rarefied atmosphere of the Cannes
competition brought with it a sense of occasion and
history. It has lately not gone unnoticed that the gate-
keepers of many major festivals have not exactly
rushed to include women or filmmakers of color, or
for that matter, emerging voices—it is rare for a young director
(Diop is 37) to vault immediately into the Cannes pantheon. For
anyone paying attention, though, the unusual degree of anticipa-
tion surrounding this long-awaited debut was not about what Diop
represents but what she has accomplished: this is a filmmaker who
has, in no uncertain terms, announced herself as a major talent,
with a series of short and medium-length films—Atlantiques
(2009), Snow Canon(2011), Big in Vietnam(2012), A Thousand
Suns(Mille soleils, 2013)—that add up to a distinctive and already
formidable body of work.
Atlantics, a deserving winner of the runner-up Grand Prix at
Cannes, synthesizes the intoxicating moods of Diop’s previous
work into an oneiric fable of migration and transmigration—sus-
pended between realism and fantasy, the living and the dead, here
and elsewhere. If there is one constant in Diop’s otherwise restless
cinema, it is the notion of the in-between: the paradoxical condi-
tions of exile and displacement as experienced physically and
psychically; the push-pull tension of being in one place while pre-
occupied with “the life far away,” as a character’s tattoo in Big in
Vietnamreads. In-betweenness also describes the formal qualities
of Diop’s films, which mingle unpredictable ratios of documen-
tary and fiction, resulting in hybrid narratives where, as she has
put it, “nothing is true and nothing is false.”
Many first noticed Diop as an actor in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots
of Rum(she has also appeared
in Antonio Campos’s Simon
Killerand Matías Piñeiro’s Her-
mia & Helena), and there is in
her work an unmistakable kin-
ship with Denis’s cinema: its
sensuality, its ease with bodies,
its openness to desire. But
Diop could be just as usefully
grouped with a loose cohort of
filmmakers in their thirties—
among them Eduardo
Williams and Gabriel
Abrantes—who also attended
the French art school Le Fres-
noy and have redefined the tra-
ditional limitations of
short-form filmmaking as
opportunities for freedom. As different as they are from one
another, Diop’s shorts all explore the possibilities of truncation
and reduction, revel in ellipsis and enigma, seek out new struc-
tures and shapes for storytelling.
The 15-minute Atlantiques, which Diop made at Le Fresnoy,
inaugurates the biracial filmmaker’s inquiry into the reality and the
idea of Senegal, her father’s ancestral home. Born and raised in
Paris, Diop is the niece of the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty; her
father is the jazz musician Wasis Diop. Atlantiquesemerged in the
wake of the so-called pirogue phenomenon of 2005 and 2006,
which saw thousands of young Senegalese men braving the haz-
ardous sea journey to Europe, their mission summed up by a Wolof
slogan, Barca mba barzakh, that translates as “Barcelona or death.”
The “migrant crisis,” subject of countless films in the past decade,
emerges here not as a political issue but a state of mind, even asDiop gets across the stark underlying socioeconomic facts.
Around a nighttime fire on the beach, an unseen ocean roaring
behind him, a young man named Serigne tells his friends about
his experiences on a pirogue (a wooden fishing boat): the physical
pain of being pummeled by winds and waves; the dreams of home
and the hallucinations of fish-men; the absolute certainty that he
would do it again. Cut to day and a shot of tombstones, which
reveals Serigne’s date of death. Is this a flash forward or was his tes-
timony—to which we later return—from beyond the grave? Diop
further scrambles our sense of time with on-screen text about a
“nightly invader” that strikes “during deep sleep,” inducing “the
most burning desire to flow into the ocean.” This account turns out
to be by survivors of the 1816 Méduseshipwreck off the Mauritan-
ian coast, the aftermath of which inspired the famous Théodore
Géricault painting The Raft of the Medusa. Despite the availability
of high-resolution formats, Diop shot Atlantiques on low-def video
that hovers on the threshold of visibility and the verge of disinte-
gration, matching the precarity that Serigne is describing. The final
images are close-ups of a rotating Fresnel lens, its cyclical move-
ments and refracted light mirroring the film’s sly formal operations.C
o-written with judith lou lévy, who would
go on to be a producer of Diop’s feature, Snow
Canonattempts something like a conventional
narrative, detailing an encounter between Vanina
(Nilaya Bal), a moody teenager left alone in the
French Alps while her parents attend a funeral,
and her new American babysitter, Mary Jane (Nour Mobarak). As
Vanina’s boredom shades into curiosity and desire, the girls’ inter-
actions take on elements of role-play. This quintessential rite of
passage is all the more intense for unfolding within a sealed-off
environment, a chalet with its blinds perpetually lowered, its rooms
occasionally flooded with colored light. Diop juxtaposes this inti-
mate, temporally bound drama with a timeless, indeed geological,
one, cutting repeatedly to the spectacular mountain terrain outside,
a physical landscape that comes to stand in for an interior space.
With Big in Vietnam, co-written with the filmmaker Thierry de
Peretti, Diop investigates not just the dream but also the physicality
of movement and escape. She returns here to the theme of exile,
this time from the perspective of a French-Vietnamese filmmaker,
Henriette (Henriette Nhung), who is in the middle of shooting an
adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereusesin a
Provençal forest. When her Valmont abruptly walks off the set,
Henriette follows suit. Wandering the streets of Marseille, she’s
drawn by the strains of familiar music to a Vietnamese restaurant,
where she discovers an ad hoc community and joins a countryman
in an impromptu karaoke duet. The characters remain in perpet-
ual, vaguely somnambulist motion: the missing actor continues his
progress through the woods, and Henriette and her new friend
keep walking—observed from a Ferris wheel as they thread
through sunbathers on the beach, as if compelled by a larger force
toward the infinity of the horizon.
A less confident director would have shied from tackling a
weighty family legacy so early in her career, but with A Thousand
Suns, Diop confronts her uncle’s masterpiece Touki Bouki(1973)
head on. The action unfolds before and after an outdoor Dakar
screening of Touki Bouki, held in the presence of that film’s lead
actor Magaye Niang—still herding cattle, clad in cowboy boots and
head-to-toe denim, and given proper movie-star treatment by
Diop, who introduces him to the strains of Tex Ritter’s High Noon
theme. The day nonetheless brings indignities and regrets: On his
way to the event, Magaye gets into a squabble with a young cab dri-
ver, who demonstrated against then-President Abdoulaye WadeCloser Look:Atlanticshas been acquired by Netflix.Mati Diop