Atlantique (2019) is a very weird fairy tale set in a coastal city in Senegal. Directed by the French Mati Diop, the movie has beautiful photography and provides interesting glimpses of life in a developing African country. The picture's narrative style is one of retrospective explanation. Things that you see on screen have a significance that you discover only after the sequence is completed. This means that the viewer proceeds in a state of uncertainty -- odd elements of the narrative are explained later. This is an odd way to make a movie -- ordinarily, of course, the meaning of events on-screen is determined by expository scenes preceding the event that requires explanation. Diop's film works in reverse order. This means that we have the curious sensation of importing emotion into scenes after the fact that were otherwise enigmatic or simply baffling -- I had the sense of feeling sadness or suspense, sometimes a half hour after the scene from which the feelings of sadness or suspense originated. This technique is true to experience -- often, we discover the significance of an event many months or, even, years after it happened. But it's a bit disorienting to see this approach used in the context of a fantasy narrative.
A good example of Diop's retrospective explanation of events is an early sequence in the film. The movie's heroine, Ada, meets her boyfriend, Souleiman, under what seems to be a board walk or pier near the ocean. Souleiman wants to have sex with her but she defers his embrace until nighttime. Souleiman seems very upset and, even, morose about Ada putting him off. Later, we learn that he has to leave to seek work in Spain on that same night and, so, his parting from Ada was less tender than he had wished. This is particularly poignant because, as we later learn, his small ship sailing for the Spanish coast is wrecked in a storm and he drowns. So his final parting from Ada was unsatisfactory for both of them. Another example of Diop's odd backward-style narrative is a scene in which Issa, a city detective, struggles to reach his apartment before sundown. He is sweating profusely and gets caught in a traffic jam as the sun sinks ever lower in the Western sky. Issa gets to his apartment just as the sun sets and, using his handcuffs, fastens himself to post -- this is because, we later learn, he is afflicted by zombie-possession and becomes a zombie when night falls and he doesn't want to walk around undead. Therefore, viewed in retrospect, the scene in the traffic has an almost Hitchcock-style suspense -- but the structure of the film causes us to feel suspense retroactively. We didn't know what was at stake with regard to Issa's rush to get home before dark. (Diop's narrative is bizarre in this regard as well -- the whole scene has no narrative pay-off: we next see Issa as a zombie notwithstanding his operatic effort to fetter himself to avoid this fate.)
Atlantique's plot, at first, seems resolutely realistic. A group of laborers are working to build what seem to be luxury apartments next to an enormous glass tower, a vast and imposing shard of blue steel and plate-glass that soars a thousand feet into the sky. (The tower, which seems to be imaginary, is realized through brilliantly evocative matte work -- sometimes, it seems to be a space rocket that has mysteriously landed on this coast thunderous with giant surging waves and the endless rumble of surf; on other occasions, the tower looks like the Ark or the Tower of Babel.) The laborers have not been paid for three months and they are starving and can't support their families. The men stage a sort of strike, walk off the job, and that same night depart on a small vessel to make a landfall as illegal migrant workers in Spain. At home, the laborers frequent a kind of discotheque in a beach-side bunker. The women who run the disco are upset because the workmen who patronized the place, many of whom are their boyfriends, have left for Spain. Someone remarks that the girls come to the bar to meet the young men and with the "boys" gone to Spain the disco is sure to fail. Ada, who is in love with Souleiman, one of the laborers, is betrothed to a rich playboy named Omar. Her wedding to Omar is scheduled for a week in the future. Ada senses that something bad has happened to Souleiman and she doesn't love the rich and demanding Omar. (He gives her a brand-new I-Phone as a sort of pre-nuptial gift.) Ada's girlfriends, people she knows from the bar, are mercenary (they have names like Fanta and Dior) and they urge her to marry Omar. But Ada is uncertain and fearful and resists the match. (Ada seems to come from a lower middle-class milieu and it's not clear to me how she came to be matched with Omar. One of her girlfriends tells her to be sexually attentive to Omar or "he will take a second wife before you're even pregnant the first time.") There's an elaborate wedding at Omar's mansion attended by his family and all of Ada's friends. In the course of the wedding party, the honeymoon suite is set on fire and burns. Ada is accused of setting the fire, although she denies this. Ada says that she is getting messages from Souleiman on her cell-phone and others say that they have seen him around town. A detective named Issa Diop is assigned the task of solving the matter of the incendiary fire at Omar's home -- by this point, the marriage has been annulled. He tries to get Ada to confess but she refuses. (At one point, he even has her briefly jailed.) Ada is subjected to a humiliating virginity examination -- she passes. But now enraged she hawks Omar's cell-phone, buys another cheaper phone, and gets a message that Souleiman is returning to see her in the middle of the night. How can this be? We have learned that Souleiman was drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Spain. (Everyone in the movie speaks, at least, four languages: Wolof, French, Arabic and English - the lingua franca in Senegal is, in fact, French; however, people talk to police officers in Spain using fluent English.)
Other uncanny events are occurring. The girls from the disc turn into white-eyed zombies and dash around town intimidating people and setting fires. They confront the rich contractor who withheld pay from their boyfriends who have now perished in the shipwreck. Ultimately, they force the contractor to pay them what their men were owed -- threatening to burn down the glass tower if he doesn't cough up the money. The girls, who are zombies after dark, order the contractor to dig their graves in the cemetery -- in this way, it is revealed that the girls have become possessed by the spirits of the drowned laborers. People get inexplicably ill and have seizures. The film that earlier seemed steadfastly realistic has now become a kind of horror film. Even Ada's pious friend, Mariam, has a fit and is told that she must bathe her head in holy water into which verses of the Qu'ran have been dipped to be cured. Another girl is told by an Imam qua healer that the evil spirit entered her belly through her belly-button because she was going about in an immodest way with her midriff exposed. Ultimately, the spirit of Souleiman possesses the detective Issa and, notwithstanding the handcuffs, he breaks free, makes his way to Ada, and has sex with her -- finally, consummating the love between Souleiman and Ada albeit using someone else's body for the task. The film ends with Ada glaring into the camera and indicating that the future belongs to her.
The film seems to be an attempt to make sense of the seemingly pointless deaths of young Senegalese seeking labor in Europe. Diop suggests that the dead laborers are somehow resurrected in their widows and give them strength and fortitude. It's an odd notion and I don't know exactly how it should be taken. The film is very beautiful with stunning seascapes, grey forbidding skies looming over wild surf, and remarkably interesting images showing life in the big African city. (It's a combination of gorgeous palms. expensive villas, and unbelievable squalor -- at one point, there's a suggestion that black and white street dogs somehow are the vessels carrying the spirits of the dead.) Diop is a modernist film-maker -- she doesn't use establishing shots and many sequences are filmed with a handheld camera pushed up into people's faces. The soundtrack is appropriately eerie -- the rumble of the surf is persistently heard under people's conversations and the complex Afro-pop soundtrack. Everything looks very real, but, of course, the story is ultimately symbolic and fantasy. This is a wonderfully interesting film, although I don't pretend to understand it.
(I now know that the city shown in the film is Dakar. Mati Diop comes from a prominent Wolof family with many members living in Paris -- her father is a famous musician. Issa is revealed to be the person lighting the fires -- which we never really see -- although possessed by the spirit of Souleiman. The film suggests that no one in a place like Senegal is remote from the tragedy of migrant workers being lost at sea -- even upper class people participate in some respect in mourning and grief. Thus, the figure of the detective becomes possessed with the spirit of the drowned migrant worker. Mati Diop acted in Clair Denis' Thirty Shots of Rum and there are some affinities between Denis' work and Diop's film style.)
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