Love on the Frozen Land

Atlantis (2019) - Vasyanovych The pitfall of political filmmaking in general, in my view, both fiction and non-fiction, is its didacticism that turns people off, however well intentioned and informative it might be. Without fail, these films come across as snobbish and classicist. It is doubly difficult as we live in an era where irony is dead and satire is getting harder and harder to pull off when the real world already feels like a grotesque satire of itself. 

Good filmmakers know how to use genre filmmaking in order to tell a topical, timely and socially relevant stories. In the recent surge of those films - Bacurau and Transit come to mind, filmmakers brought down sci-fi closed to home - political/economic instability & ecological devastation into a revenge thriller against first world, and a fascist takeover (history repeating itself) into an identity crisis, directly referencing the current state of Brazil and Germany/Europe respectively. These sci-fi genre tropes gave the filmmakers a lot of freedom to reflect on the current state of affairs while giving themselves a bit of distance to play around and even have some fun, while regarding them as if they are mere sci-fi and works of imagination, not socio-political realist films.

Writer/director/cinematographer Valentyn Vasyanovych (who lensed The Tribe) is one of those good filmmakers. And his stunning new film, Atlantis, proves that a science fiction can be both visually arresting and also socio-politically relevant to the present. In this case, it concerns his home country of Ukraine.

The subtitle in the beginning says it's the year 2025, a mere 4 years in the future. The Ukraine-Russian war seems to be over but wintry industrial landscape suggests that the war devastated the ecosystem and made a large swath of its land uninhabitable. The human toll both physically and emotionally is even greater, as we are introduced two PTSD ailing former soldiers whose sleepless nights are spent on driving around and shooting at makeshift targets planted on frozen tundra. The steel mill they both work at is taken over by multi-national corporation: an English-speaking figurehead on a giant screen talks of the bright future while pumping up Soviet style propaganda reminiscent of 1984. Many are fired from the job because of the automation of labor.

After his PTSD buddy's fiery suicide T2 style into the furnace at the steal mill, Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk) moves on and gets a job as a water tanker driver - water became scarce since the bombardment and landmines planted during the war contaminated much of the country's water supply. On the road, he meets Katya (Liudmyla Bileka), a volunteer for a humanitarian group which identify the war dead by digging them up from half-frozen, muddy mass graves. It's a gruesome process, but it will give a lot of people closures, she says.

Talk of homeland takes a center stage. Ukraine might appear to be an unforgiving, desolate wasteland now, but where else would its inhabitants live? Sergiy is offered to work for an international organization and go abroad by a woman he rescued from a landmine wreckage. He says resolutely, "This is my home. Where could I go?"

The visual symmetry in wide ratio shot Atlantis is awe-inspiring. The industrial landscapes and machinery, as well as decay of abandoned houses (think of decay porn of Detroit, but doubling here as the war aftermath) have common with Ed Burtynsky's photographic documentations of the late stages of capitalist society - Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Anthroposcene (2018) and other documentaries that focuses on ecological devastation and human footprints on earth. Charting the country's recent history with human elements, Vasyanovych also finds common spirits with Jia Zhangke, the master chronicler of China and its people.

Vasyanovych unsubtly comments on Russian expansionism as seen in the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Western commerce influence, but the film is not without hope. Working with non actors (Rymaruk is a former soldier, Bileka is a medic), the director imbues real life experiences within their fictional characters to give sense of connection, sense of national identity. The bare bone romance between Sergiy and Katya with the cold and unforgiving backdrop hints at the glimmer of hope, human resilience and connection despite dire circumstances. It's there, even if we are only able to detect it through infrared camera footage.Atlantis marks the arrival of the first great film of 2021.
Please visit Metrograph for virtual tickets. The film opens on 1/22.

Bad Moon Rising

Lúa vermella/Red Moon Tide (2020) - Lois Patiño In a coastal fishing village in Gallicia is experiencing another ocean related tragedy; Rubio, a fisherman who is known for retrieving dead bodies of shipwreck victims so the mourning villagers can have closures, became the victim himself of the tumultuous waves off the coast when his ship sank. His body might never be found. The local legend dictates that there is a monster living in the dark sea, awakened by the devil moon. Three ancient witches come in to town, to take its villagers who seem to be immobilized by grief on the spot where they stand by shrouding them over with white clothes making them a literal ghosts statues, while under red moon. And that's the gist of the story in Lúa Vermella.

Like Oliver Laxe's Fire Will Come, Patiño makes full use of Galicia's rustic natural beauty and its real inhabitants to tell a tale steeped in legends and its surroundings. His images are out of this world though. I've seen his short Fajr before, shot in Morrocan desert morphed with shadowy cloaked figures. Lúa vermella goes several steps further. I mean, those mindboggling transition shots alone makes it a worthwhile viewing.

Or This Dream We Call Human Life

The Cloud in Her Room (2020) - Zheng Lu  

Muzi (Jing Jin) is home in Hangzhou for the new year's. She is a recent college graduate, trying to find her way in the world. Her parents are divorced and in other relationships. She herself is in uncommitted relationship with a college flame Yu Fei (Zhou Chen) who comes to town to see her. She is also trying to vie for the attention of an older, worldly bar owner (Kangning Dong). She spends a lot of time alone in her parents old high-rise apartment, now empty and abandoned. So this is the backdrop of this densely layered, cinematically inventive debut of Zheng Lu Xinyuan. 

Mixing documentary style handheld camera work, interviews, inverted images, mirror effects and static long takes, the monochrome The Cloud in Her Room is perhaps the most astutely realized work that befits its self-consciously digital cinematography (by DP Mathias Delvaux), even much more so than Alfonso Cuaron's Roma. It's precisely because of its social realism, here and now of changing China, instead of period piece of reimagined Roma - the vast crisp grey mid-tone reflects the smoggy industrial cityscape and one-thousand-cigarettes-a-day urban ennui much more so than the 70s Mexico City. It also accentuate its dreamy, ethereal, soft-edged quality of the film. Some of the compositions and experimental playfulness as well as its mid-tones remind me not of French New Wave (incessant smoking notwithstanding), but that of Japanese New Wave, namely some of Wakamatsu's work and Yoshida's Heroic Purgatory. 

As the characters declare never to fall in love again, and buff each others advances and (not)say farewells in haze and smoke, we realize that it's all been done and seen before. But Zheng Lu seems to have found a new fresh way to look at the human banality and make it beautiful and dreamy, breathing a new life into, uh, life.