‘Atlantide’ Review: An Iridescent Ode to the Boy Racers of the Venetian Lagoon
11.04.2022 - 03:53
/ variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic“Atlantide” is the Italian name for Atlantis, the fictional island utopia imagined by Plato, supposedly cursed by the gods and swallowed by the sea. It’s a pointed legend to evoke in a film about Venice, the sinking city that, real as it is, feels like a place we collectively dreamed into being, that could somehow be taken from us at any moment.
The crumbling fragility of this impossible city and the defiant ennui of its native sons are both richly illustrated in Italian video artist Yuri Ancarani’s dazzling hybrid documentary, which navigates Venice’s various secondary islands and the waterways that separate them through the heavy-lidded eyes of young men who live for rollicking motorboat action and, it seems, not much else. All life here is made to feel as beautiful and vulnerable as the city itself.
Since premiering at (where else?) Venice last year, “Atlantide” has made a strong impression on the festival circuit, buoyed by its ripe, sensual imagery and seductive sonics. The film’s woozy audiovisual splendor doubles down on everything that “The Challenge,” Ancarani’s similarly well-traveled 2016 debut feature, suggested about his gifts as a stylist and an observer of milieu: As in that film’s transfixingly beautiful, bizarre depiction of the moneyed Qatar falconry scene, “Atlantide” magnifies and aestheticizes a peculiar, socially vibrant subculture to such a degree that it bypasses vérité altogether en route to a kind of earthy surrealism.
As a character study, however, the film remains distant and opaque, even as it fictionalizes the trajectory of its real-life human subjects. Perhaps granting us greater access to their inner lives would break its humid, hypnotic spell.The tone is set by an
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