Ella Christiansen
If ontology is the study of existence and being, hauntology is the radical study of absence and non-being. With no future to turn to, memories fill the present with the ache and yearning of a ghost, a lost lover never laid to rest. Mati Diop’s 2019 Cannes Grand Prix winner Atlantiques explores hauntology through a woman troubled by her bleak future and haunted by her young love, Soleiman who drowned at sea. Rather than merely disturbed by the figures, Ada and the girls of town are possessed by the peaceless young men and bear the weight of their dissatisfaction as they live the boy’s futures and complete their unfinished business, namely collecting money stolen by an employer and saying their goodbyes. Atlantiques juxtaposes painterly realist cinematography with a hauntological genre-bending narrative to subvert Western storytelling techniques and illustrate the horrors of inequities.
Mati Diop and Claire Mathon craft an elevated and painterly realist visual style to
afford Ada and her life cinematic grandeur without sacrificing the grounded reality of Dakar.
Structurally, Diop employs a 1.66: 1 aspect ratio, associated with European arthouse films
including classics such as Cleo 5 á 7, Belle Du Jour, Cries and Whispers, and Elevator to the Gallows. This classic visual style cements the film within the arthouse canon and demands that audiences afford Senegalese subjects the same respect that they would European subjects. Additionally, Mathon employs striking insert shots of the ocean and skyline to illustrate the strength of nature and the imperceptible spirits it contains. Diop includes glowing sunsets amidst dusty orange days, cool teals of the night sea, and the pearlescent moon, drawing the audience’s eye to simple vacant imagery mirroring how Ada increasingly turns to the empty sea in search of her lost Souleiman. Mathon and Diop disrupt this natural color scheme and minimalist compositions when Souleiman returns, possessing the body of Inspector Issa so that he and Ada may consummate their love. Keeping in line with the Islamic myths of the djinn which are often depicted in blues and greens, green speckles from decorative laser lighting projectors swirl about, disrupting naturalism with neon just as Souleiman’s spirit disrupts the natural with the supernatural.
Beyond color, Diop is careful to show faces in close-ups and the sweeping suburbs of
Dakar in wide. The still camera tracks distant children in the street, populating the film with interesting extras to maximize the beauty of life in Dakar and represent Diop’s Senegalese culture honestly. Mathon delicately captures a multitude of details, refusing the cinematic allure of soft-focus cinematography in favor of depicting every face demanding money in clear focus. Just as Diop commits to packing the frame with details in establishing shots, she and Mathon are careful to frame extreme close-ups which make even the smallest movements of Ada’s stoic face perceptible. These close-ups also illustrate the grandeur of intimacy, specifically the small hugs and kisses Ada and Souleiman share establishing the stakes early in the film. After Souleiman’s death, these close-ups pull back, and Diop fills the camera’s frame with frames through elegant mise-en-scene design like placing Ada behind jail bars, hijabs, mirrors, and within lines to show the limitations placed upon her as a young woman. Diop and Mathon delicately craft striking arthouse cinematography which uses a distinct aspect ratio, color palette, and shot sizing to illustrate how Ada and Souleiman’s love represented hope in a futureless world.
Diop’s narrative in Atlantiques employs horror genre conventions like possession and ghost motifs to display the haunting of lost loved ones, oppressive control over women’s bodies, and unimaginable futures in post-colonial Dakar. Like many horror films, Atlantiques depicts characters causing a disturbance and haunting people they’ve left in the world of the living on account of unfinished business. However, Diop reinterprets the weighted concept of such haunting as an exercise that is nonviolent, rightfully retributive, and an act of possession. The Senegalese men who drowned at sea on their way to find work in Spain return through the bodies of the young Senegalese women in hopes of collecting their contractor’s debt and, in the case of Souleiman, consummating his love with Ada. This invokes American horror films and Islamic culture’s djinns to craft a distinctly modern, literary, and haunting ghost story unique to Diop’s ancestral homeland of post-colonial Muslim-majority Senegal. This subversive narrative challenges the concept of “good” and “bad” as the ghosts that would be traditionally perceived as malevolent have righteous intentions, paralleling how African labor and liberation movements are often demonized despite their righteous intentions.
That said, the boys’ possession is not wholly harmless as the women lose all control of their bodies against their will, waking to find their feet dirt-crusted and their lives in disarray as if they’d been attacked. This plot point slots neatly into Diop’s thematic concern with men’s outsized control over women’s bodies. From arranged marriages to virginity tests, Ada’s body is rarely her own. Seized by an indignant depression, Ada doesn’t eat and sees no joy in her impending marriage to a wealthy bachelor. Just like her sea-lost lover, Ada is without a future; she’s cursed to go through the motions, never finding herself material or consequential, just like a ghost. Thus, through genre forays into horror and references to Islamic folk storytelling, Mati Diop’s Atlantiques is a hauntological cinematic masterpiece.