Film ǀ From the mummy to the sandwich – Friday

The portfolio of the arthouse streamer MUBI currently pays homage to slowness: with films of “slow cinema” such as Nicolás Rincón Gilles Valley of Souls, Dea Kulumbegashvilis Beginning, who won prizes at the San Sebastián Festival last year, or with Walentyn Wassjanowytschs now exclusively on the portal Atlantis. They are all films that, in their own way, celebrate the austerity of a minimalism that appears brittle at first glance – with often long uncut shots, long shots, little or no music and few dialogues. Sure, it takes patience. But it is precisely in this tranquility that the power and the possibility unfold to tell without aesthetic gimmicks and to create unforgettable pictures.

One of the unforgettable pictures from AtlantisWassjanowytsch, in which Vasyanovytsch is also responsible for the script, the camera and the editing in addition to the direction, is one of the most unusual bathtubs in cinema history: an excavator shovel in the middle of a war-torn landscape of rubble, marked by mines and the remains of fallen soldiers. Sergiy (Andrii Rymaruk), the broad-shouldered, war-traumatized hero of the film, prepares his bath here with great meticulousness. In the uncut sequence, he walks back and forth between his bulky tanker truck and the shovel, lets water in and starts a fire under his “tub”, into which he finally slides.

This lived pleasure in the midst of the rubble is a “lighter” moment in this film, which is about the destructive consequences of a war that Vasyanovich is setting up in the near future: 2025, one year after the end of the Ukrainian-Russian war, it is due Beginning of the film. The film celebrated its world premiere in Venice in 2019, where it was named best film in the Orizzonti section.

What is the conflict between the Ukrainian and Russian armies and the pro-Russian militias doing with the country? Wassjanowytsch replies in a film with post-apocalyptic tableaus. Everything is broken: the land an uninhabitable desert with acidic groundwater, the economy on the ground. And Sergiy, the silent ex-soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder, cannot find his way back to life after the war. He’s still practicing shooting iron figures in competition mode with a friend, and in the evenings he cleans his pistols.

Crowdfunding for soldiers

After the old smelter in which he works has been closed by the American boss, Sergiy begins to drive water into the rubble landscape on an order. Like a neo-Stalker – you inevitably have to think of the “Zone” from Andrei Tarkowski’s classic from 1979 – he pushes his vehicle through the landscape that the army is searching for mines. The dead land appears at the same time as a mirror for the tortured soul of Sergiy and that of his nation. Stranded in a rickety van, Sergiy encounters rescue worker Katja (Lyudmila Bileka), who is exhuming soldiers’ corpses on behalf of the Black Tulip Mission, which is trying to determine the circumstances surrounding their death and bury them. It is an encounter that only the cinema can tell: romantic despite all the destruction around it.

Vasyanovych was inspired by stories about the catastrophic deterioration in water quality in the currently occupied areas in eastern Ukraine. In general, it connects in Atlantis clever reality and fiction: lead actor Rymaruk had just returned from the war and worked for the non-governmental organization Come Back Alive, which helps Ukrainian soldiers in the war in Donbass by means of crowdfunding. The Black Tulip humanitarian organization really exists. “War is not over until the last soldier is buried”, it says on their homepage.

Wassjanowytsch frames the real elements with a vision of the future, most of which his camera captures in strict long shots. But it’s so gloomy in Atlantis in between, there is also a fascinating poetry inherent in what is happening.

So is Atlantis on the one hand a film about the devastation of a war: death everywhere, long shots in which the remains of corpses are carefully cataloged by doctors from the Black Tulip organization, a landscape that seems poisoned and destroyed buildings in which Sergiy searches for traces of his past. But at the same time Vasyanovych finds moments of enchantment and even humor in the morbid. At one point, an abrupt cut is followed by a funeral burial, like from the mummy to the sandwich. It has to go on!

At the same time, and that gives this dark film an almost touching ray of light, narrated Atlantis that something new can grow out of rubble. This is exactly what manifests itself in another unforgettable scene. It too has to do with the water, this time it is a transporter stuck in the rain with a pair of windshield wipers trying to fight it wildly, while one of the few camera movements in the film captures the “surge” of an emotion that suddenly captures the viewer surprised. Atlantis is a film that compels to watch and yet rewards. The magic lies in slowness.