bodies // bodies // commodities 

Atlantics (2019)
Directed by Mati Diop
Gore Lecture Series #4

Looking at the films so far in Professor Daniel R. Quiles’ lecture series, we see Sayak Valencia’s text on capitalism utilized primarily through the lens of family (Us and The Host) and community (Bacurau). Admittedly this is a reductive read but it’s important to highlight what makes Mati Diop’s Atlantics a particularly different experience. Whereas those films center on families and possess fairly straightforward narratives, Diop’s film is exceedingly more ephemeral and lyrical, delving into the supernatural in abstractions. It’s also the first film in the series that’s directed by a woman, a key distinction in understanding gore capitalism through gendered terms. 

A French-Senegalese coproduction, Atlantics is set in a suburb of Dakar where we observe men demanding for their wages. Tired and understandably volatile, it’s these sequences that would recall the recent imagery of migrant workers in Qatar during the 2022 World Cup. For the men here, it's been three months since they’ve been paid and the monument of their labor is a kind of ominous, futuristic beacon; a tower of globalization that casts a tall shadow over the dust bowl of a suburb. With Rhianna on my mind, we see love in a hopeless place as Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) and Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) make out in an abandoned, dilapidated shelter. It’s Souleiman’s last night in Dakar as he and his fellow workers plan to make their way to Spain in hopes of a new job; their voyage is to take place under cover of darkness as they set sail on the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ada is set to marry someone else, an opulent landowner named Omar. As with all doomed romances, Ada loves Souleiman but, out of practicality, she weds Omar. 

A bizarre, inexplicable act of arson during Ada and Omar’s wedding leads to a police investigation, followed by some rather matter-of-fact supernatural elements. With the men that left Dakar now lost and presumed dead, it’s the women they left behind that are possessed by their spirit. Milky-eyed, they proceed to accost the landowner that withheld their pay, breaking into his lavish mansion to demand payment. But it’s the police detective assigned to Ada’s case that’s seemingly inhabited by Souleiman’s spirit, drawing him closer to Ada. 

I won’t argue against what I perceive to be certain logical lapses in Diop’s narrative, particularly the rather sore spot of men embodying their female partner with the exception of Souleiman, who instead embodies the officer character. At times, however, Diop’s abstractions work counter to some of the broader social concerns that occupy the periphery of the film. While some of the more striking imagery involves the milky-eyed women that prove too overwhelming for the crooked construction site operator, Diop’s primary interests reside in the individual; particularly Ada. We see Ada’s image distorted at the start of the film in a broken mirror and gradually, through trial and error, along with understanding the limits of her agency, embarks on a journey of self-discovery to complete her image (one of the film’s final images is of her looking at her reflection in full). This is compounded by mourning the death of Souleiman and those that died with him, in what Valencia would cite as the need to “construct meaning around the death of any person. To make sure that death and the pain of an Other cause a shudder in all of our bodies.” 

But these are all fragmentary elements that, disappointingly, do not come together in a persuasive or percussive way. Diop’s stylism is top-shelf, but the blending of a social realist drama in the vein of the Dardennes doesn’t jibe with the supernatural elements at play. Spirituality has been a component of the Dardennes’ films before, but lack of even a rudimentary framework makes Atlantics feel a bit sparse, even sloppy.