The interlinked names of the lovers have an unusual power in Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s haunting, halting “Banel & Adama.” They play over and over as a whispery lullaby on the sound…
The interlinked names of the lovers have an unusual power in’s haunting, halting “Banel & Adama.” They play over and over as a whispery lullaby on the soundtrack. They cover the sheets of paper on which Banel compulsively writes their names, like a schoolgirl practicing cursive on the name of her crush. There’s an innocence to it at the beginning, as though Banel, whose strange mind we mostly occupy, is simply delighting in the sound and shape of their togetherness.
In a small village in northern Senegal, Banel and her husband Adama are in love. Glorying in the impressionistic prettiness of DP Amine Berrada’s camerawork, with its signature images of sun flares and sand dunes and slender boats being punted in silhouette through glittering waters, they tend to Adama’s small herd of cows by day. At night they tell each other stories, the camera now lingering on the lovers’ hands and lips.
But the rains don’t come. Adama, who married Banel according to Muslim custom after the death of his elder brother, her first husband, is expected to take over as village chief but refuses the role, and now he wonders if his defaulting on village customs has somehow brought on the drought.
“Banel and Adama…” she hears the words murmured in her dreams. Now they no longer sound like a soothing litany but an increasingly desperate incantation, and as the cows start to die in the heat, their hides shrinking to dusty suede in the ceaseless sun, and as the locals start to abandon the desiccated village, Banel’s behavior becomes more erratic. She kills lizards and tosses them into a fire. She shoos away the little boy whose intent stare causes her such unease.
Sy’s film is a curious little fable, not quite fully formed in its final stages, and occasionally so sedate and opaque, under Bachar Mar-Khalifé’s melodic, piano-forward score, that it feels like it is drowsing. But it’s a striking debut nonetheless, especially as it revolves, with graceful poetry around the inner experiences of such a curious, unknowable woman.
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