A love story suffused in beauty and mystery, “Banel & Adama” draws you in right from the start. Set in an unnamed Senegal village during an unspecified time, it opens on two young lovers quietly blissing out on each other. The two are first seen in striking close-up — early on, the movie cuts from an image of her lush, pretty mouth to a shot of one of his steadily adoring eyes — like puzzle pieces that the movie bids you to fit together. Given the dreamy vibe as well as the bright, vivid palette, it is an invitation that you readily take up.
Banel and Adama — played by the appealing Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, both nonprofessionals — live in a small house in a small village that looks like it could exist today but also decades earlier. (The villagers use kerosene lamps, and I don’t recall anyone using a cellphone.) There, Adama tends a modest herd of cattle as Banel keeps him company, their smiles, laughs and movements pleasantly in sync. Like all besotted lovers, they seem to exist in a private realm, one that the French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates with cozy framing, daubs of strong colors and a bold, graphic sensibility.
The story emerges in morsels of naturalistic dialogue and brief, on-point scenes that incrementally sketch in the characters’ intimacy, shared history, familial relationships and distinct temperaments. Two years earlier, Adama, now 19, married Banel, his brother’s widow and second wife. Tradition, as his mother and others insist, decrees that he now assume the role of the village chief, a position he refuses. He’s content simply to be with Banel, and together they plan to move out of the village once they dig a nearby house out of a mountain of sand. Each day, they dig and they dig, a task that soon groans with portentous symbolism.
Sy has a terrific eye and, working with her cinematographer Amine Berrada, she quickly hooks you with the beauty of Banel and Adama’s world, pulling you into their everyday life with hints of drama and myth, though mostly with the graceful compositions and the region’s natural riches, its green fields and blue skies. The camera moves just so, never racing or crawling, which allows you to luxuriate in the details that fill in the picture and deepen the realism. Sy’s attention to physical surfaces — shimmering water, nubby cloth, smooth bark — is particularly adept and helps create a sense of texture so strong you can almost feel it in your hands.
