Love is a blindingly selfish emotion made all the more dangerous by the totality of its feeling. For the afflicted, it devours the attention, making everything else fade into irrelevance. Going about one’s day-to-day tasks can become almost impossible, the world and all its tedious obligations might as well not exist. It is perhaps this intensity and violence that make depictions of obsessive love such fertile ground for artists and storytellers. Especially in the form of folklore and tales from antiquity ‒ lovers who chase each other endlessly across the sky or who die tragically to be together in the afterlife. The beautifully shot Banel & Adama, by director Ramata-Toulaye Sy, is about such love in all its dark, possessive, earth-ending possibilities, and it fittingly is told in a world shaped by folktales and myth.
Our two lovers live in a northern Senegalese village. Remote, paternalistic and traditional, their lives are shaped by the rhythms of day-to-day existence and their duty to the community. Adama (Mamadou Diallo) is next in line to become chief of the village after the sudden death of his brother. This tragedy binds him to a woman, Banel (Khady Mane), originally his brother’s wife, taking her on as his own a fulfillment of his “Muslim duty.” Despite the circumstances surrounding their marriage, the pair appear to be madly in love. In the opening scenes, we watch them tend to the tribe’s cattle while imagining their future together. In their rare free time, the couple works to dig up two houses on the edge of the village, abandoned and covered by sand. Banel dreams of using them to begin a life independent of the town and the obligations of familial and tribal duty. She pushes Adama to refuse his role as chief and keeps him from attending the elder’s group prayers for rain. The rain continues to not come and the village is faced with the reality of not having a chief to lead prayer. The cattle begin to suffer and Adama’s commitment to Banel’s plan for their life is tested by his loyalty to a village that is slowly withering away.
Writer-director Sy, co-writer of multiple previous features, displays an attention to the ability of women to communicate their desires and inhabit their own subjectivity in a world structured and dominated by men and the obligations of family life. Sibel (2018), a Turkish film co-written by Sy, features a deaf-mute female lead only able to communicate using an ancient whistling language. Her first directorial work, 2021’s Astel, was her first film to focus on the social world of the Senegalese people and on the position of women in the workforce of tribal society. Banel’s desire for a family life separate from the social world of the village makes her a woman apart. She is interrogated throughout the film about her plans to have children, which she refutes, and her lack of sociability with her mother. The one family member she appears close to her is her sibling who chose a life of studying the Quran, taking the position of reason where Banel views herself as occupying the world of emotion. For Banel, digging up the abandoned houses on the edge of town is an aspirational project which promises the ability to create a life separate from the social world of the village, but she is warned by her brother that doing so will unleash the spirits inside, he points out they have been left buried for a reason after all.
Spirituality in the film is shaped by the religious and social traditions of the people of Senegal, a novel mix of Islam and folk belief. Sy’s rendering of such into the medium of cinema offers a vision in which the world of humans and spirits hang in an ambiguous balance. Banel’s desire curses her and pursues her. While working in the field, a force seems to approach Banel, she reaches out and touches it. Banel is watched from afar by a village child, Malik (Amadou Ndiaye), who Adama jokes might be a “scribe angel,” keeping record of all good and bad deeds. She is resentful of the divide between the village’s expectations of her and her own understanding of her femininity.
Folkloric might be the closest approximation of the mode Banel & Adama is told in. Within the cosmology of Senegalese spirituality, the plot takes seriously the danger of malevolent spirits and the relationship between the survival of the tribe and one’s spiritual devotion. As Adama is pulled further from his duty by Banel, the village continues to suffer from the drought and the villagers grow more and more suspicious of Banel. Did she have some part in the death of Adama’s brother, her original husband? The film never makes a definitive claim on what happened, instead operating through a kind of karmic ontology which speaks in visions and inferences. The images which are conjured in these moments are strikingly poignant; Sy is especially drawn to moments of labor and rest. We often see the people of the village working in the field or finding shade from the harsh sun.
Sy’s film is a beautiful, poetic and almost mythical parable on the dangers of obsessive love. Her images are striking in their attention to color and formally impressive geometric framing. While her characters might seem a bit flat, every personality in the film plays a role in advancing the parabalistic tale of love and karmic balance.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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