Alia Shawkat in Gates’s Atropia.
Photo: Sundance Institute
There’s an inherent farce to the U.S. government, or so Hailey Gates suggests in her debut feature film, Atropia. Based on her 2019 short film Shako Mako, Gates expands her exploration of fake towns established by the American military for training purposes and the actors cast as townspeople — and potential terrorists — in those training scenarios. At the heart of both the short and Atropia is Alia Shawkat’s Fayruz, whose Iraqi heritage and commitment to character lend her an overwrought self-seriousness played for laughs.
That mix between political satire and off-kilter romance sits at the heart of Atropia, a film that Gates first set out to make as a documentary about the changeover in these fake towns from the Middle East to Russia, landing eventually in a fictional 2006 — three years into the Iraq War. The upside to fictionalizing what is an outrageous story unto itself is, as Gates tells it, “you can make a lot more jokes.” Atropia is, in turn, a joke-dense spoof, one of Sundance’s funniest films, skewering the military-industrial complex, method acting, and rom-coms all in one.
While a number of rom-coms are about fixing one — or both — members of a couple so they can function in society, the screwball is driven by, well, a screwball: a wacky, self-assured woman who pulls everyone into her orbit with increasingly self-assured antics. Fayruz never really wisens up so much as Atropia devolves around her: Actors start improvising more and more; bombs and animatronics go off at the wrong times; everything grows increasingly base and disgusting.
Shawkat is Atropia’s greatest asset. “She feels like a Pre-Code actress,” Gates said. “She has something old-timey about her. I always describe her as a surgeon because she’ll do one eye movement and change the trajectory [of a scene].” Gates was inspired by wartime comedies like M*A*S*H or Catch 22, as well as Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be “because it makes fun of war and dealing with actors.” Playing opposite Shawkat’s Fayruz is Callum Turner’s Tanner, a real veteran of the Iraq War playing a fake insurgent who goes by “Abu Dice” (“You know that means ‘father of Dice’?” Fayruz asks him at some point). For all that Shawkat’s Fayruz is wacky and eager — anxious to be “discovered” in Atropia so she can move along to Hollywood stardom — Turner’s Abu Dice is stoic and self-serious. These aren’t just theater games to him; they were once his life. For his part, he’s giving “a bit of a Gary Cooper,” Gates said of Turner, another old Hollywood throwback.
Atropia writer and director Hailey Gates.
Photo: Rich Polk/Variety via Getty Images
Gates, whose background is fashion and modeling, found that the costuming and production design was a place where jokes could speak to the shoddiness of the military exercise. “I wanted her clothes to feel like she was stealing from a community-theater wardrobe,” she said of Fayruz’s haphazard style and thought Abu Dice’s tendency to use his sunglasses as a headband was “really tender.” The most gifted fashion choices are saved for Chloë Sevigny sitting beside Tim Heidecker as military talking heads who never bother to stand up from their chairs. Sevigny goes full mid-aughts: fake tan, overly gelled hair, platinum lips. “I wrote that character as having ‘crunchy bangs,’” Gates said with a laugh. “It’s so fun to explore near history.”
An actress in her own right, Gates has appeared in everything from Ricki and the Flash to Challengers to Uncut Gems to Twin Peaks: The Return. Though Atropia is far from Lynchian, she looked back at her time with David Lynch fondly — especially his love for practical effects, whether it was throwing more Bisquick on a table to make it look dirty or using a piece of pizza to simulate human flesh. “He loved movie magic,” Gates said, “and I love movie magic too.” In building Atropia, she had to enlist production designers who were the best at their jobs and have them make everything look worse: shoddy costumes, bad effects, anything to show the seams in the production. “I was rereading [Lynch’s] Catch a Big Fish the other day,” Gates said, “and he said something so great. ‘This should be fun. We should be like puppy dogs wagging our tails.’ And it should be. Every single day we went to set we were like, ‘Can you believe people are letting us do this? This is outrageous.’ Nobody should be able to do this.”
