In the Atmosphere: The politics of Mati Diop's Atlantics

Abstract

186 film In the Atmosphere The politics of Mati Diop’s Atlantics Lindsay Turner Atlantics, mati diop’s first feature film as director, tells the story of Ada and Souleiman, a pair of young lovers living in Dakar, Senegal. Ada is engaged to be mar­ ried to a wealthy businessman, Omar. Souleiman is employed as a worker on a construction project, an eerily out-­ of-­ place white tower up the coast from the city that sometimes looms dimly in shots of the skyline. Since Souleiman and his co-­ workers are not being paid for their work, they plan to emigrate to Europe. But before Souleiman has a chance to tell Ada about it and bid her farewell properly, the entire crew sets off secretly at night by boat. In the Atmosphere | 187 They don’t make it, but they are not quite gone: they leave behind a group of young women—Ada and her friends—whose mourning takes on a supernatural cast. The plot should be saved until you see the film, but what follows involves haunting, arson, and an unex­ pected return: a chain of loss, drama, mystery, and love. Atlantics is a pointedly contemporary film that works through a brilliant mix of genre conventions and realist themes; equal parts love story and ghost story, it is also a tale of labor, gender, inequality, exploitation, and global migration. Water—the Atlantic Ocean—is obviously one central thematic presence. But ultimately it is in the air that the film’s major themes most powerfully converge. As Diop depicts it, the air of Dakar is magnificently full: of dust, of sunlight caught in dust, of exhaust or smoke, of orange haze as the sun sets over the titular ocean. It’s no accident that a film so starkly topical is so gorgeously—literally and concretely—atmospheric. WithAtlantics,Diopemergesfromalongtraditionof Senegalese filmmakers and also takes her place in the world of European cin­ ema. Trained in Paris, she starred as an actress in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008) and directed several acclaimed short films and documentaries. Atlantics has been received and lauded world­ wide: in 2019 Diop became the first black woman director to be in the running for the Cannes Festival Lion d’Or, and Atlantics was awarded a Grand Prix. (Its cinematographer, Claire Mathon, also shot another acclaimed 2019 film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.) Yet especially in her most recent work before Atlantics—­ the documen­ tary A Thousand Suns (2008)—­ Diop turns back toward Senegal; the documentary centers on the classic Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1973), written and directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. For viewers familiar with Senegalese cinema, Atlantics also recalls another quasi-­ supernatural movie of a shifting Dakar, Ousmane Sembène’s classic Xala. But if Diop’s background as a filmmaker, like the film’s pro­ duction and reception, bridges European and African contexts, Atlantics unfurls in one place: Dakar. The westernmost city on the African mainland, Dakar is located on a point of land that juts out 188 | Lindsay Turner into the ocean. The movie magnificently conveys a sense of the specific place and imparts a local feel. In both indoor and outdoor scenes—shots of traffic jams, shots of lace-­ curtained bedrooms— you can almost feel the salty, dusty air settle on your skin. This local atmosphere, however, is inseparable from global conditions, since in Diop’s hands, both the pollution in the air and the rela­ tionship between air and water are highly politicized, linked to contemporary economic development and the transatlantic slave trade, respectively. In other words, air is about interpenetration and in this film inseparable from history, from global inequality and disaster. Or as the poet and scholar Margaret Ronda writes, “With its uneven composition and its complex relay between corporeal interiors and exteriors, air offers an index of how nature and history interweave in an ongoing dynamic. Bearing the impress of productive relations in the form of emissions and pollutants, air expands our definition of these relations to include substances not directly generated by these processes but nevertheless entangled in them.” Dakar’s pol­ lution, for example, is omnipresent in the film, starting from...