Atlantique (Atlantics)
ATLANTIQUE - NETFLIX
In order to understand and experience Mati Diop's Atlantics, one should know that it is what many in book and film culture call "flowery". Its emphasis is not on a cohesive or ground-breaking plot but the characters, their emotions, and their environment. There is a particular meditative pause that the feature tries to create in order to deliver a certain ambience that not only transcends the viewer's emotions, but also their spiritual presence to the environment. So, it is with great displeasure to report that Atlantics fails at delivering all of its desired goals.
Poor acting, pretentious cinematography and a story that feels straight out of a Mexican telenovela are the least of the film's transgressions. The scrutinising factor is that it continually jumbles its tone, destroying any sort of atmosphere that it was starting to create.
Is it a psychological exploration of its characters regarding the society they live in? Is it a supernatural romantic love story in the vein of 1990's Ghost? Is it a social justice movie that tries to speak about the injustices many minorities and third world countries face today? So many questions appear regarding its identity that, at the end of the day, describing it is a fool's game. A stronger director would have been able to pull together a cohesive project of all these ideas but, where this film stands now, it is nothing but a forgettable mess that cannot get one thing right.
Take the setting of Dakar for example, an excellent chance for the director to explore the beauty of small countries where, despite backward thinking, and a corrupted system holding the place back from actualizing its potential, it still has a bridal pride about itself that makes it endearingly charming and yet emotionally tragic at the same time. If it was in better hands, these aspects could have easily been transformed into the psyche of its characters and the progression of its plot, or perhaps even silent, yet ambient, music that could have captivated the presence of the beholder — but alas, it is not.
This is a shame because the concept of mixing supernatural elements and social commentary looks exotically exciting at first but, at the end of the day, it is something that shatters the film into uneven pieces. The supernatural angle destroys any emotive silence and the social commentary ultimately fails because its disentangled range of topics feels inconsequential to the love story of the two main characters as they never seem to overcome those shortcomings in order to meet again.
Everything coincidentally falls into the lap of its characters that titling this film ‘A Series of Fortunate Events’ would not at all be out of place. This also destroys any sense of conscious regarding social commentary. The weight of those burdens are apparent for two seconds and then quickly forgotten by the filmmakers. This in turn doesn’t allow the audience to feel any regret or sympathy for the state of the setting or society that the whole world in a certain way is responsible for. This is also not helped by its one-note characters that are better described as caricatures than actual three-dimensional human beings.
All of these failed elements create a sense of detachment in the viewer, which consequently becomes a death sentence for the film. Having no other alternative to offer, this film exists in its own hellish space where the more artistic viewer feels detached to its concepts and a general viewer resents its juvenile narrative and technical failures. One cannot even watch it in a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ way due to its boring pace.
ATLANTIQUE is streaming exclusively on NETFLIX November 29th