He doesn't even know how to dig

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Films of 2019

#47 : Atlantique (Atlantics)

Mati Diop’s supernatural debut forces young Senegalese lovers to choose between love, duty and servitude, then adds a surreal twist.

Never heard of this, so have no idea what to expect - and the description above doesn't exactly help.  Although, of course, it does make me think "how surreal is the surreal twist gonna be"?

So in the first 15 minutes, we meet Ada who's engaged to Omar but in love with Souleiman - and, to be honest, they could have given us that plot in 10 seconds, but they don't half draw it out.  It's also clear (in case the title of the film didn't make it clear) that the sea is going to feature A LOT in this.

And then Souleiman disappears (at sea, of course) and Ada is not happy.  She shows this by sitting (or standing) around and staring into the distance.  A lot.  If I was Omar, I might think she didn't want to marry me - but that certainly doesn't occur to him.  And then, some weird ghost shit happens.  And although people are a bit freaked out by the weird ghost shit, they accept it all pretty quickly.  And err - well that's it, really.

It's an OK film, but either there's a lot that happens in it that I really don't understand or there's actually not a lot that happens in it - I can't quite decide.  It also makes odd choices with the lengths of scenes - there are some long ones where nothing happens and then the briefest of scenes where major plot points are glossed over.  I think I'll defer to Wikipedia which describes it as the story of two people "struggling in the face of employment, class, migration, crime, family struggles, and ghosts".  As you do.  

But it's well filmed - the sea shots in particular are cool and quite intriguing and there are also some cool shots of the local town.  They also wear some very cool sunglasses in Senegal (I'm guessing it's pretty sunny there most of the time).

It's well acted too - Mame Bineta Sane plays Ada in her film debut and she does a good job.  Most of the rest of the cast were first time actors as well and they all put in good performances - credit has to go to director, Mati Diop, for this I guess.  And it was Mati's debut as well - and you'd have to say she does a good job, even if I thought the plot was a little thin.  

The film was put forward for the competition at Cannes (winning the Grand Prix, which is obviously the SECOND most prestigious prize awarded) and somewhat astoundingly, she was the first black female woman ever to have a film entered into the competition.  Seriously?!?  It's also of interest that the dialogue is in Wolof - I don't think I've ever watched a film in Wolof before (and yes, I know it doesn't really make any difference if you're only reading the subtitles).  

Overall, this is good-looking but somewhat slight plot-wise - although I suspect some of the content went over my head on account of my somewhat different life experience.  And whilst I agree the surreal twist would be pretty weird if it happened in real life, it's not exactly wild for a film.  It's all fine, but not a lot more than that in my opinion.

#48 - Good looking, but grisly
#46 - Engrossingly content-free