Atlantis
An artist blends vision and technique in a way that creates a unique work.
This is an extraordinary film. It is clearly apt to describe it as the creation of Valentyn Vasyanovych since he is credited as director, writer, editor, photographer and co-producer. Being unfamiliar with his other films (this is in fact his fifth feature), I cannot say if this is characteristic of his work, yet it is self-evident that he is a serious artist, one intent here on making a film about Ukraine that cannot in any sense be regarded as an entertainment. His vision - not too fanciful a word - is to confront the fact that wars are all too capable of causing such destruction that even the victors are losers.
To illustrate this point Vasyanovych sets Atlantis in the near future, that is to say in 2025 which is described as one year after the end of the war. Ukraine may have triumphed over the Russians but the countryside, itself the site of mines that will take years to defuse, suggests a post-apocalyptic world. It would be possible to see this as a comment on war in general, but even so there are specifics in this imagined future that extend to including the presence here of a group that already exists in Ukraine. It's known as the Black Tulip Mission and its purpose is to seek out bodies of the dead yet remaining from the First and Second World Wars as well as from more recent conflicts.
Atlantis is a film with a storyline and with two central characters, a former soldier named Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk) and Katya (Liudmyla Bileka) a woman whom he meets and who persuades him to join her in volunteering to work for the Black Tulip Mission. Earlier, as we have seen in the film's opening scenes, he has worked in a factory alongside a friend named Ivan (Vasyl Antoniak), but both men had suffered from PTSD due to their war experiences and Sergiy has subsequently had to assess things afresh with the factory, which had been engaged in steel production, facing an enforced closure. The subsequent meeting with Katya occurs when Sergiy is acting as a driver delivering water supplies to those dealing with the unexploded mines but the work for the Mission now becomes central to his life. Nevertheless, he will eventually have to choose between staying in a country where the future is bleak or taking up an offer to work abroad.
This description may make Atlantis sound relatively straightforward, but it is presented in a way that is both individual and challenging thus rendering it a film which will divide opinion. For Vasyanovych this is a calculated risk and, indeed, everything in the film gives the impression of having been precisely judged by him. First of all, there's the decision to make this first and foremost a film about the situation created by the war. Sergiy and Katya are the only truly central characters and even they are seen as figures in a landscape. This is emphasised by the mode in which the film is shot. People are rarely seen in close-ups and most of the time there is no camera movement. The fixed images, basically a series of static long shots, carry their own sense of stasis indicative of the lack of any hope of life moving forward. Furthermore, the pace is slow adding to the feeling that the film is observing this devastated world with a certain clear-headed objectivity. Yet there is ultimately more to it than that.
The stylised approach adopted does initially draw attention to itself even as we find ourselves admiring such details as the absence of music and the thought given to the colour tones. At the outset the method attracts our attention more strongly than the material, but once one has adjusted to the shooting style it actually contributes to the impact of the film. Indeed, even early on a rare camera movement gives extra power to an unexpected dramatic event. Similarly, on account of the contrast which causes it to stand out from the rest, the use of a slightly less distanced shot, one of Sergiy and Katya seated at a table, talking and getting to know one another, achieves an unforced warmth. Yet another instance can be found in a scene without dialogue in which Sergiy enters an empty and bomb-damaged building (we assume it to be his former home). This sequence carries extra impact because the camera follows him in and then up stairways and along corridors only briefly returning to a poignant static shot towards the end of the episode.
Towards the end Vasyanovych does find a way of suggesting that life in this waste land is not entirely without hope, but this is done in a context that portrays a world already lost to devastation and pollution. The actors are able enough to communicate this one positive note without overstating it, but there is no doubt that Atlantis is first and foremost a director's film. In 2019 it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival and it's a truly striking work, albeit one that will self-evidently not appeal to all tastes. At the start and at the close, the stylisation is even greater, something brought about with what I understand to be a thermal imaging camera which creates infra-red shots. On its second appearance this treatment allows us to see Sergiy and Katya as more than just themselves and as representatives of a wider humanity. That being so, it is a rare misjudgment on Vasyanovych's part that he adds one further shot not using this process and thus losing the impact of bookend images that are balanced and of extra import. But, that apart, Atlantis is, if not a full-scale masterpiece, a wholly personal work that could only come from a true artist.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Andriy Rymaruk, Liudmyla Bileka, Vasyl Antoniak, Lily Hyde, Philip Paul Peter Hudson, Igor Tytarchuk, Sergiy Komishon, Vitaliy Sudarkov, Kateryna Popravka, Karolyna Sheremeta.
Dir Valentyn Vasyanovych, Pro Valentyn Vasyanovych and Vladimir Yatsenko Screenplay Valentyn Vasyanovych, Ph Valentyn Vasyanovych, Pro Des Vladen Odudenko, Ed Valentyn Vasyanovych, Costumes Karolyna Sheremeta.
Garmata Film Production/Limelite/Best Friend Forever/Ukrainian State Film Agency-Mubi.
106 mins. Ukraine. 2019. Rel: 4 May 2021. Available on Mubi. No Cert.