Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych, 2019)

A few years back, I decided to watch a random selection of films on Festival Scope. My thought was, maybe if I randomized the list of available films and watched a few on a whim, I might discover some gems that wouldn't have otherwise gotten my attention. As you might expect, most of the films were mediocre at best, but a couple were quite interesting. One of them was Black Level, a Ukrainian film from 2017. As it turns out, that film's director, Valentyn Vasyanovych, more than made good on the potential that film exhibited.

Atlantis is actually Vasyanovych's fifth feature, but he has been an unknown quantity outside of Ukraine. It's easy to see why Atlantis has garnered such attention on the festival circuit. It is simultaneously timely, in a political sense, and speculative in its temporality. As territorial conflicts between Russia and Ukraine continue to roil -- previously in Crimea, and more recently in the Donbas -- Vasyanovych has taken an unusual tack with his anti-war film. Atlantis takes place five or so years after the war between the two countries, proposing that there will be no victors when the fighting is done.

The film focuses on Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk), a war veteran now eking out a living in a ruined landscape. He is a kind of walking dead man, having lost everything he cared about before the war, existing in a haze of PTSD and emotional desolation. At the start of the film, we see him and an old war buddy (Vasyl Antoniak) working in an iron foundry, barely functioning as individuals and reduced to a near-feral existence. Shortly after his friend's death, Sergiy loses his job. The metal works has been bought by British venture capitalists and will be shuttered. In need to new employment, Sergiy becomes a truck driver, transporting clean water to areas across the parched countryside.

Quite by chance, he encounters a team from the Black Tulip, a group of aid workers who locate and detonate landmines, as well as excavating the anonymous dead from their shallow battlefield graves. Partly because of his budding relationship with a Black Tulip worker named Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), Sergiy joins the group as a part-time volunteer. As such, he is returning to the killing fields to partly undo some of the horrid work he was forced to conduct during the war.

Although Atlantis consistently follows Andriy's point of view, the film is episodic, even aleatory. Sequences depict various instances of Andriy's experience, but they are somewhat self-contained and proceed by chance. The narrative, such as it is, moves forward by incidents involving broken-down vehicles, side-of-the-road discoveries, and of course the invisible hand of the postwar market. While this anti-structure might prove vexing for some, it accurately reflects Andriy's state of mind. He is a post-subject. He is too traumatized to have a concrete plan, and this, Vasyanovych suggests, is the state of Ukraine writ large.

The film shows fairly immediate resonances with Tarkovsky, particularly in its treatment of the post-Soviet environment as a future wasteland. Vasyanovych's preference for long shots, slow movement, and highly deliberate composition also calls to mind those contemporary filmmakers indebted to Tarkovsky's legacy, such as Sokurov, Loznitsa, and Zvyagintev. Atlantis avoids the sometimes leaden tone of Sokurov, but he doesn't replace it with mordant tragicomedy the way Loznitsa can. 

In fact, Vasyanovych does not seem interested in "slow cinema" per se. Instead, he focuses in process, the gradual, lumbering changes that happen across a destroyed, traumatized nation. His materialism, which involves a continual relationship to broken mountains, slag heaps, and the rusted-out remnants of long-dead industry, seems indebted to the earthwork sculpture of Robert Smithson. How much can humans intervene in nature, and how does nature itself resist this transformation?

If Atlantis has a significant flaw, it's that Vasyanovych spends the final quarter of the film openly explicating the themes that he'd more productively left implicit. When Andriy is offered the chance to leave Ukraine and start a new life, he refuses. He asks, "if I leave, what did we fight for?" Even though his homeland is now essentially a mass graveyard and irreversible ecological disaster zone, this man feels confident that he belongs among the dead. As the Black Tulip crew continue to disinter corpses, he sees that, in death, the Russians and Ukrainians are eventually the same. Andriy survived, but he cannot have a life as such. His job is to uncover the past and bear witness to the slow, geological formation of a future that he will never see.