and who faults the older man’s generation for complacency. The kids
at the square refuse to believe he’s the guy up on screen. He reunites
with his friends, among them Diop’s father, who wonder why Mag-
aye—whose Touki Boukicharacter longs for an idealized France—
never left Dakar (“Toukimeans to travel and you’re stuck!”).
The confrontation with the past prompts Magaye to phone his
long-lost co-star, Mareme Niang, who now lives in Alaska. Diop
facilitates their reunion with a brilliant sleight of hand, transport-
ing Magaye to a snowy landscape of the mind. As Magaye and
Mareme’s conversation turns more ruminative, Diop weaves in
these immortal lines from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: “You
don’t have a home until you leave it, and then, when you have left
it, you never can go back.” At once tribute and sequel, A Thousand
Sunsengages in a time-traveling conversation with Touki Bouki,
revisiting and expanding the universe of Mambéty’s landmark film.T
he tricky feat that diop carries off to perfection
in Atlanticsis to balance the richly suggestive ambigu-
ity of her shorts—their preference for atmosphere
and oblique incident—with the narrative require-
ments of a feature film. (Somewhat confusingly, the
original French title is Atlantique, though perhaps
the multiplicitous names, suggestive of shifting subjectivities, are
appropriate.) Diop’s feature returns to the scenario of her short
from 10 years ago, but this time assumes the perspective of those
left behind. Her young heroine, Ada (Mama Sané), about to enter
an arranged marriage with the wealthy, aloof Omar, is in love witha construction worker,
Souleiman (Ibrahima
Traoré). Days before the
wedding, Ada learns that
Souleiman and his friends—
all owed months of back
pay—have left by sea for
Spain. On the night of the
ceremony, just as a friend
tells Ada that Souleiman has
been spotted back on land, a
fire mysteriously breaks out
at Omar’s apartment, leav-
ing a smoldering hole in
the marital bed...
Given the dichotomy of
presence and absence running through her work, it makes sense that
Diop’s first feature would be a ghost story. Already in Atlantiquesthe
short, the boys around the fire seem like spectral figures: “I’m here
talking, but my mind is elsewhere,” Serigne says. A fever spreads
through the Dakar of Atlantics, infecting Ada’s female friends as well
as the police inspector, Issa (Amadou Mbow), who has been tasked
with investigating the arson. The boys, lost presumably to a watery
grave, have returned to possess the ones they love and to settle old
scores—or in Issa’s case, to give Ada a chance to bid farewell to
Souleiman, a necessary step toward self-determination. Diop han-
dles the supernatural turn with matter-of-fact understatement, aided
by Fatima Al Qadiri’s otherworldly electronic score, and nodding
to the local belief in djinn, spirits that can take human form.
For all the fantastical flourishes, Diop and her excellent cine-
matographer Claire Mathon (who also shot Alain Guiraudie’s
Stranger by the Lakeand Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
retain a documentary specificity in their depiction of contemporary
Dakar. The heat, dust, and clamor of the city, palpable in A Thousand
Suns, is even more pronounced in Atlantics, which finds much tex-
ture and life in its variegated settings: abandoned buildings, beach
clubs, brand-new constructions, modest teenage bedrooms. The one
digitally composited invention on Diop’s part is a futuristic sky-
scraper, a hulking intrusion on the shore and skyline inspired by a
project known as the Gaddafi Tower, a proposed collaboration with
the former Libyan leader that never came to pass. Diop is also atten-
tive to the tensions of class and religion as they play out among con-
temporary Senegalese youth, touching on the conflicts between Ada’s
more traditional friends, like the hijab-wearing Mariama, and the
more liberated and materialistic ones, like Dior, a barmaid at the
oceanside nightclub that proves to be a pivotal location.
Fire and water loom large in Diop’s cinema of the elements, but
there is no force stronger than the inexorable pull of the ocean.
“Beware, the sea has no friends,” someone tells Mayage in A
Thousand Sunsas he ventures too close to the water (his character
in Touki Bouki, we recall, was forever looking over the cliffs and out
to sea). Although repeatedly invoked, the ocean is seen only once
in Atlantiques, the short. In Atlantics, the feature, it is inescapable,
with much of the action transpiring on the water’s edge, and
screen-filling shots of the Atlantic serving as frequent punctuation,
as the jagged Alps did in Snow Canon. The ocean appears at various
times of day, by turns becalmed and roiling, a pathway and a grave-
yard. In a recurring visual motif, it swallows up the sun, as the
moon rises to exert its own influence on the tides. Alert to the
cosmic cycle governing the film—and us all—we are reminded
of Serigne’s cry in Atlantiques: “Look at the ocean, it has no
borders.” The words are both caution and promise, speaking at
once of death and of the life far away. 38 |FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019AtlantiquesA Thousand SunsSnow CanonThe tricky feat that
Mati Diop carries off to
perfection in Atlantics
is to balance the richly
suggestive ambiguity
of her shorts—their
preference for atmos-
phere and oblique
incident—with the nar-
rative requirements
of a feature film.