Italian director Yuri Ancarani declares in his Venice Film Festival statement that “Atlantide is a film that began without a screenplay.” It could very well be said that it still hasn’t got one.
There are, perhaps, 15 lines of dialogue in Ancarani’s ridiculous and amateurish film about Daniele, (Daniele Barison) a young Venetian man dealings with drugs, relationships and boat propellers, as he takes his neon lit boat to the waters of Venice. Afraid to say, that’s about it. The slapdash non-existent script just feels perfunctory, the lighting surrounding Venice feels artificially constructed as multiple lights, emitting from under the protagonist Daniele’s boat, illuminate the Venetian waters. The film plays out in extended scenes of Daniele performing acts of crime, interacting with drugs, having sex, and spending time driving his boat around Venice with his boombox thrust up in the air in the middle of the night. It makes one feel like an old man with a broom, internally yelling at this kid and his mates to turn it down.
Atlantide is not without merits. The score, when not being drowned out by overbearing dance music, is really pleasant and there are some wonderful compositions caught with Ancarani’s voyeuristic lens. However, placing a camera in position, driving around Venice and using whichever scenes you think work within this aesthetic is hardly grand filmmaking when using a city that is widely known for being one of the world’s most aesthetically pleasing. It makes this verite style of ‘extreme realism’ feel starved for authenticity.
An overhead shot of a sex scene is surprisingly alluring in its red and green lit backdrop but features a brand new character, with whom we then spend five minutes watching her dance on the edge of the boat and do cocaine. She exists much like the rest of the characters as a non-entity in this empty vacuum of a film. It also feels uncouthly misogynistic, as the film seems to be revelling in its male gaze. The first shot of a girl that Daniele meets is quite literally of her chest, then her crotch. If there was any attempted depth in this, at how this teenage boy only sees her as a sex object, it’s a huge stretch to make within the fragmented thinly-plotted menagerie of scenes that they have together. One in which, using their supposedly limited amount of dialogue, mentions their lack of affectionate moments together.
This vibe-check of a film can be surmised by its final ten minutes, as the camera rotates 90 degrees and proceeds to showcase Venice in all its admittedly gorgeous glory. But this film premiered in Venice, and for those people here, instead of spending their hard-fought time on Atlantide, they could walk 100 metres outside and view the canals in which the film is set in, wait for the sun to set, and enjoy the illuminated streets and stunning architecture. What makes Atlantide such a misfire is that it doesn’t transport you into the film, and it fails to immerse you within its ambiance. It’s in this fallacy that going outside anywhere in the world would be a more fulfilling experience, emotionally and spiritually, than suffering through this. For all its wondrous colours, this is a film that surmounts to an Instagram post, a teenager’s Snapchat story that you can’t skip, but you probably should.
Atlantide is now available to stream online.
Learn more about the film on IMDB.
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