The first feature film by Dyana Gaye is a pleasant fable following the criss-crossing stories of three characters between Turin, New York, and Dakar. Sophie (Marème Demba Ly—fabulous for the first time on the screen), Abdoulaye (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), and Thierno (Ralph Amoussou) never meet, but their destinies are connected. In a metaphorical chassé-croisé, everyone is somewhere else, but Dakar is, for all of them, a common anchor point.
Under the Starry Sky (Des étoiles) adds to the previous works by Dyana Gaye, confirming her poetic, sober style. It forms, with Deweneti (2006) and Saint Louis Blues (Un transport en commun, 2010), a sort of trilogy, exploring spaces: first Dakar, then Senegal, and subsequently the world. In the short Deweneti, set between reality and imagination, the young Ousmane leads us to encounter a variety of people and situations as he wanders through various areas in Dakar viewed from different angles and points of view. The medium-length musical Saint Louis Blues is a journey around Senegal, with a structure that is the opposite of Under the Starry Sky’s. In the latter film, the protagonists never physically meet one another, while in the former strangers gather in a bush taxi to travel together from Dakar to St. Louis. Each character has personal reasons for the voyage and feelings, which they all reveal through music. The accompanying sound track itself recalls the myth of leaving, of emigrating, emphasizing the “Italian” dream—like the “American dream” of finding wealth in migration—which will be accomplished in Under the Starry Sky, whose story brings out the motif of wandering across the world and crossing towns, countries, and continents.
The film opens with the Senegalese Sophie arriving in Turin, looking for her husband who, unbeknownst to her, has meanwhile left for New York. She is alone, a stranger and lost. Her sense of being misplaced is also underscored by the Italian music, which accompanies her on her bus trip. As always in Dyana Gaye’s work, the music is significant, even though in this film the moments of extradiegetic music are rare and some sequences are almost silent.
In the next scene we cut to Abdoulaye settling in New York. He has migrated first from Senegal to Italy, then to France, and then to the U.S., each time looking for something more. (The succession of these destinations reveals a symbolic imaginary hierarchy).
In the third scene, we cut again to a new location, this time Dakar. Thierno is landing there for the first time, accompanying his mother, Aminata. He has come from New York temporarily to “bury his father and discover his country,” one that Aminata is rediscovering twenty years after her departure.
The entire story is thus built on continuous passages from one place to another: Turin, New York, Dakar, three cities, three countries, three continents sadly linked by history and slavery, as the short visit of Thierno to the house of slaves in Gorée underlines. Typically the camera follows one character with a close-up and then opens with wider long shots, placing the individual in a broader context, as in a rhythmic dance. In this way, the viewers discover the place along with the character, seeing it from the point of view of a stranger whose gaze and feelings guide the spectators’.
Sophie, Thierno, and Abdoulaye are “elsewhere,” without any point of reference, obliged to evolve and transform themselves in the new space, to renegotiate their position in the new societies, and to build a new unexpected future. Sophie, coming from Dakar, arrives in Turin when Abdoulaye is no longer there; Thierno and Aminata land in Dakar the day after her departure, which is the same day that Abdoulaye arrives in Aminata’s bar in New York. Like a catachresis, in each missed rendezvous the one arrives where another one was supposed to be. This is very well illustrated, for example, by a close-up of Abdoulaye, disoriented, sitting on a bench at a New York harbor, accompanied by the music for piano that—as we will discover in the following shot—the “American” Thierno is playing in Dakar, as if each of them had changed his position with the other.
This gentle, upbeat film deals with exilic conditions and belonging, but also with contemporary Senegal, seen through the lens of its diasporas situated in different places, spaces, territories, and situations. It gives us access to the protagonists’ intimate spaces. It poses questions concerning the balance between personal destiny and community belonging, the reasons to leave or to stay, and the relationships between those who decide to stay and those who have left. Under the Starry Sky also introduces a measure of social commentary, evoking, even if briefly, social problems like exclusion, as well as solidarity and the living conditions of black people in Italy and in the U.S. (which we also see in a brief clip included in the film from My Brother’s Wedding by Charles Burnett, 1983).
Under the Starry Sky is not only a polyphonic but also a multilingual film, shot in Wolof, Italian, English, and French. The transitions from one space to the other are executed using sober montages, with a powerful but flowing editing. Each city is shown in its essence, filmed with a particular light, a typical soul and ambiance. The narrative easily crosses the real and symbolic boundaries, but it also illustrates the fractures. To build a new life each main character is affected by a break: Abdoulaye abandons Sophie (and his cousin with whom he has arrived in America); Sophie abandons the pursuit of her husband; Thierno leaves his life in New York to become a new person. The ruptures, the discontinuities of migration, and of diasporic experience inhabit the movie. These displacements and multiple cultural references remind us of the filmmaker’s personal diasporic experience. Born in France, of a Senegalese father and a mother of Italian descent, she moves, like her characters, among different spaces, cultures, languages, and belongings.
In fact, even though every character is filmed in only one place, the entire movie is itinerant, as it follows characters walking, wandering, traveling (by train, by bus, by ferry, by plane), but also on perpetual quests. Moreover, we see traveling within traveling (Thierno goes from Dakar to Gorée Island, Sophie from Turin to the seaside, Abdoulaye from New York to Sacramento).
The film ends with these two journeys of Sophie and Abdoulaye and with Thierno packing his suitcases. The three destinies are now connected through the musical continuity of the song Les étoiles by Mélodie Gardot, from which the French title is taken. Their respective fates, apparently different, echo one another’s. The personal stories cross the collective ones, the meaning emerging not in one single entity, in one single star, but in the constellation. In this way Dyana Gaye manages to tell a choral tale, made up of different pieces, which we can recompose as a symbol of the plural and composite essence of a human being, passing through life.
