Atlantis

Nicholas Jamison

FILM 486

Prof. Kristin Hole

16 March 2020

Set in 2025, one year after the end of ‘The War’ — presumably the current conflict in eastern Ukraine that further escalates in the near-future — Valentyn Vasyanovych’s film Atlantis follows former soldier Sergiy as he copes with PTSD whilst transitioning back to civilian life.  Sergiy occupies a spartan room in a deserted building nearby a steel factory where he, his friend Ivan, and the majority of the town’s men work.  The factory, like war, is a brutal place to work and filled with harsh metallic clanking sounds and yelling workers.  The town appears to be built around this factory, with one beautiful shot showing a very small Sergiy standing on the roof of his abandoned building with the factory looming over him in a way that appears to be both a telephoto and a wide-angle spherical lens shot — evidently the factory is hundreds of feet tall, allowing a wide-angle lens to function as a quasi-telephoto.  Even with his civilian job at the factory, Sergiy cannot escape the war.  In his free time, he and Ivan shoot humanoid metal targets in the snow that sound reminiscent of the factory when they are shot.  The sound design of Atlantis privileges industrial and metallic noises — the sound of the factory, the sound of gunfire, the sound of trucks in the mud, and the sound of landmines.  Likewise, the cinematography is static and emphasizes neutral and desaturated blacks, whites, greys, and military olive green.  The occasional splash of color is typically the red-white of molten steel, recalling spilt blood.  The combination of sound design and cinematography creates a Kafkaesque world for Sergiy — no matter where he goes the aesthetic of war follows him, even an activity as mundane as taking a bath occurs in the scooper of a backhoe against a desolate landscape.  After the factory shuts down, Sergiy finds himself delivering water via army surplus truck to soldiers and civilians exhuming bodies and landmines from an especially war torn region of eastern Ukraine — even as a civilian in peacetime, Sergiy continues the war effort.  While delivering water Sergiy meets Katya, a woman who is a member of the ‘Black Tulip’ organization tasked with recovering and identifying corpses from the war.  Hoping to atone for his crimes during the war, Sergiy assists her.  In the final act of the film, Sergiy is still haunted by PTSD (Katya likely is as well), yet the sound design of the film shifts away from industrial sounds to include natural sounds of birds and rain.  Through this subtle shift, the film concludes with a sense of redemption for Sergiy and Katya, or at least a sense that redemption does exist.  Bookending the film are infrared night-vision shots that are in a brilliant magenta-red.  The first infrared shot is from an aerial point of view and shows a team of soldiers, including Sergiy, executing and burying a man during the war.  Despite the vivid colors, it feels cold and inhumane.  The final shot is also in the same infrared, but from a more human point of view.  This shot shows Sergiy holding Katya in bed as they (hopefully) move past the war and find happiness.

Atlantis

Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych

Ukraine

2019