Whether programmed by coincidence or intention, today’s opening of Atlantis at Lake Worth Playhouse offers, like most great science fiction, a harrowing and prescient reflection on our present moment.
Director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s sophomore feature, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, is set in Eastern Ukraine in 2025, “one year after the war.” It’s perennially overcast, and the roads are blankets of dirt and sludge. The drinking water is polluted. Bombed-out buildings and collapsed infrastructure are all that remains of once-functional cities. Signs of life are scant, with undiscovered landmines taking out survivors intrepid enough to leave their ramshackle shelters. Cemeteries stretch for miles.
Some degree of industry, in the form of factories churning and billowing, still hangs on for the export market, but this too is on its way out. Partway through the film, the English-speaking CEO of some multinational addresses a stable of steelworkers on a giant projection screen, informing the employees that the plant will be closing “for reconstruction” and citing changing times and “new opportunities.” The man’s enormous projected face dwarfing the human drones below him, it’s hard not to think of Big Brother, though at least the denizens of Orwell’s London received meager housing, a paltry paycheck.
Atlantis, however, is worse than a functioning dystopia. It’s a postwar wasteland beyond repair, a Cormac McCarthy nightmare as filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Yes, the Russians are identified as the perpetrators of this war, but the influence of the Moscow master is all over Vasyanovych’s pitiless approach, with its lack of cutting within scenes, its preference for extended takes and respect for the duration it takes to get something done, whether it’s stripping a recovered corpse of its clothing or creating a makeshift bath from a bit of bombed-out rubble. There are so many images that recall Tarkovsky’s Stalker that when a character cautions our protagonist to be careful, as “there are almost no civilians in the zone,” it can’t be an accident of verbiage.
He’s addressing Sergiy (Andriy Rymaryk, a nonprofessional actor and former military scout), a retired soldier and a victim of the factory’s closure, who has found new employment driving a water truck to famished regions of Ukraine. He becomes our guide to this godforsaken country, the Virgil to each viewer’s Dante. He meets de-miners working to identify and detonate the countless devices still hidden underground, an effort that one of these heroes estimates will take up to 20 years. Sergiy wanders the ruins of a firebombed apartment building, finding a moment of rest and contemplation in a children’s room, a charred piano a reminder of the cultural, as well as human, loss.
And he meets Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), an archaeologist in the Before Times who these days exhumes and identifies bodies — for the history books, for the surviving families. It’s a thankless job, a voluntary job, collecting the bones no one else will. She’s still looking for funding, but the impression is that the world has moved on from Ukraine. The movie’s unspoken question, particularly in light of current events, is how did it come to this? Where is the international outcry, the influx of humanitarian aid?
There is, finally, one such representative of an ecological nonprofit who, on her way out, offers Sergiy his own exit strategy. The writing on the wall — what’s left of the wall, anyway — could not be clearer. It will be a century until Ukraine, she says, will be a recognizable country again: To survive long-term, Sergiy needs to leave.
But he is a patriot, and so is Katya, and if nobody else stays to preserve the tatters of their civilization, who will?
When these companions consummate their relationship, they are like an inverted Adam and Eve. It is the opposite of paradise, yet they seem like the only two people in the universe. They will start a family, perhaps, and continue to rebuild what’s been lost. Under the light of kerosene lamps, their noses long accustomed to the ambient stench of decay, they just might make it. It’s a fraying tether of hope, but it’s something.
ATLANTIS. Director: Valentyn Vasyanovych; Cast: Andriy Rymaryk, Liudmyla Bileka, Vasyl Antoniak, Lily Hyde; Distributor: Grasshopper Films; Not Rated. Opens Friday, March 4, at Lake Worth Playhouse