Nathaniel in Venice: "Atlantide" and "The Lost Daughter"
Monday, September 6, 2021 at 12:00PM
NATHANIEL R in Atlantide, Best Actress, Dagmara Dominczyk, Dakota Johnson, Isabelle Huppert, Jessie Buckley, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Olivia Colman, Oscars (21), The Lost Daughter, Venice, Yuri Ancarani

Nathaniel reporting from Venice. Day 2

"Atlantide" is a stunner. And better yet, Venice specific!

My second day of the fest was a day of high highs and low lows. The high (other than the movies) was that it was a full social day. That doesn't always happen at festivals but it is like a shot of energy for extroverts like myself. The fun began meeting two Spanish journalists on the ferry to the Lido who introduced themselves since they read The Film Experience. We had a great conversation about the new Almodóvar and they totally sold me on the idea of the San Sebastian Film Festival -- new goal! Then between films a quick drink with longtime friend Boyd van Hoeij (who you've heard on the podcast a couple of times) and then a late night very Italian dinner with our own Elisa Giudici. She's been our Italian correspondent at TFE for a year now (kicking it off with last year's Venice summary) but this was our first time actually meeting in person. She's such a delight in person, as personable and fun as her writing. I'm really quite chuffed to be sharing this Venice experience with her.

The low was very low realizing that this full day of screenings wasn't going to be the norm...

The Venice Film Festival unfortunately planned poorly this year. With thousands of seats required to be empty due to COVID-19 distancing measures, the solution was either to reduce the amount of press attending or to add twice as many screenings and apparently they did neither --  everyone is complaining about how difficult it is to get into movies, no matter their badge color. One pretty famous journalist told me he'd resigned himself to seeing just one movie a day (the antithesis of what festivals are about!). But there are worse places to have free time than Venice; it's so so beautiful. And thankfully one of the most visually distinctive movies of the festival showed it off to hypnotic effect. So, on to the movies!

AL ORIENTE (José Maria Avilés)
I always try to program multiple countries so I booked this drama from Ecuador that sounded interesting. The synopsis brought the stunning Tropical Malady to mind in that it's a bifurcated narrative with one half being realism and the second more fantastical.  Our protagonist Atahualpa works at a dangerous mining site of some sort and is depressed since his girlfriend is moving away (for better financial prospects elsewhere). In the middle of the picture he casually wanders away from a campfire into the darkness around it and for the rest of the movie he's leading an incan treasure-hunting expedition a good hundred years prior. As incredible as this sounds and as welcome as the shift first was, it proved disappointing in execution. The first half is actually more fully realized both for what it shows you and what it leaves out. It's almost an impartial documentary in this regard, a fly on the wall observing the mundanity and going-nowhere sadness of the young man's life without ever over-explaining itself so your left to make your own judgments about the characters and relationships (which I always personally enjoy at the movies). Al Oriente was from the Biennale College Program which focuses on new filmmakers with microbudgets. Not all established filmmakers are good at pacing but problems with pacing are definitely common with new filmmakers and Al Oriente just never gets any more gripping or varies its speed after its establishing scenes. C-


LES PROMESSES (Kruithof)
This political drama from France begins with a montage of quick handshaking by Isabelle Huppert. It won't surprise you to hear that the legendarily fierce actress has got quite the grip. She plays a Mayor who is thrown off her game a bit by the ongoing drama surrounding a decaying housing project in desperate need of city funds and the dangling carrot of an even more impressive job prospect. Elisa already paid high praise to the French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb and it's true that he does steal the picture from Huppert (not an easy task!) as her resourceful came-from-nothing Chief of Staff. His character isn't completely coherent from start to finish but that's politicians for you. The best scene in the movie is an intimate dinner wherein the Mayor is attempting to butter up a party leader whose endorsements she wants but might not get and she asks her Chief of Staff to essentially perform his racial identity via a presumably charming story about his Obama obsession as a young man. He balks and tells a different Obama anecdote instead, one that feels like a warning shot to his boss. The story is fairly involving and its solidly made but some of its plotting strains credulity and the resolution is too tidy given how (correctly) messy the conflicts are. B-


ATLANTIDE (Yuri Ancarani)
How to even approach writing about the most visually distinctive and most experimental movie I've seen thus far into the fest (I'm writing this on day six!). The 49 year old director has made documentary shorts previously but he's "new" to us since this is his first narrative feature. It plays very much like a docudrama in that what we're seeing, by following the young aimless Daniele and his efforts to make his motorboat even faster for racing in Venice is a real subculture; the cast are non-actors obviously tasked with just sort of existing on camera as approximations of themselves.  There's no plot to speak of other than a loose thread about Daniele breaking up with his chatterbox girlfriend (the only person who strings multiple sentences of dialogue together in the movie) and him being an outcast from his subculture due to his loner and thieving behavior and presumably the state of his boat. Ancarani's filmmaking (he's his own cinematographer and editor, too) presents the boats and their gear and colored lights with such fetishistic reverence and flair (and humor once or twice) that it's impossible to miss that Daniele's boat is cheaper, especially its sad propellor.

The story isn't particularly exciting but the filmmaking sure is with often jolting shifts -- including a tiktok like aside where two obnoxious teenagers lipsync an entire misogynistic rapsong inside of their lit up boat or a hypnotic dance-to-sex scene between Daniele and a new girlfriend as they careen through Venice canals. That's especially true in its last visionary twenty minutes when we're no longer with any human begins but just on the water. With the simplest of camera tricks and a sudden shift from its thumping rave-like sonic landscape to full symphonic hysteria, it's like we've entered another world, a sci-fi apocalypse or a steampunk Atlantis or a... what to even call it? It's otherworldy visionary filmmaking; your mind knows what it's seeing but also can't quite believe it. And it's not just those twenty minutes that are transporting. You get little pockets of that level of visual thrills inbetween. (I'm not a drug peron but this is the closest movie I've seen to the feeling I had the two and only two times I had edibles and hallucinated.)

On the evidence of Ancarani's first narrative feature we'd queue up for feature #2 in a heartbeat. Atlantide starts with such shimmering mise-en-scène with nameless teens and twentysomethings socializing on a floating dock and it  ends with such visionary craft without any humans at all that it's hard to care about the abundance of flaws inbetween. If Ancarani can learn to self-edit -- you could remove twenty repetitive minutes here with some easy obvious tweaking and have a much stronger 80 minute movie  -- he'll be an incredible auteur to watch.

First eighty minutes of the movie: BCDCB; Final twenty minutes: A


THE LOST DAUGHTER (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
I've spilled so many words on an experimental Italian movie that might never be seen out of festivals that I'm running on fumes now. Which is not what Maggie Gyllenhaal deserves! I'll be brief then knowing that we'll have plenty of time to talk about this picture late in the year when it comes to Netflix (date unknown but given the actresses and studio habits, December feels likely).

In a movie not unlike her character on the Deuce, Maggie Gyllenhaal has purposefully and successfully moved behind the camera. We don't really want to keep losing brilliant actresses to directing (Jodie, Greta, and now Maggie, too?!) but if we must, let it be for actressy showcases like The Lost Daughter. Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in flashback make an eerily perfect duo as the same woman at different ages, Leda, an English literary professor on vacation in Greece. The idyllic quiet of her summer getaway is broken with the arrival of a huge loud and mean family led by the very pregnant and scene-stealing Mrs Patrick Wilson herself Dagmara Dominczyk. Also in the family is the young Nina (Dakota Johnson) struggling with a toddler and controlling husband (Olivier Cohen-Jackson). Tetchy Leda gets off to a very bad start with this new crowd and things never really improve even when they seem to. Nina's relationship with her todder has set something off in Leda and she keeps remembering her own difficult days with two daughters at the same age. 

The happiest thing to report about this drama is that it plays exactly like a great Maggie Gyllenhaal performance: multi-faceted in its moods, electric in its personality and desires, but also intimidating and thorny in temperament... a fine fine vessel, then, for illuminating complex women.  B+/A-

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Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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