Given the state of a world still dealing with the seemingly endless “final” stages of a global pandemic, the effect of writer/director Kirill Serebrennikov’s adaptation of as acclaimed (but as-yet-unreleased-in-America) novel by Alexei Salnikov is frankly rather alarming. Petrov’s Flu is a spectacle, no doubt, as the filmmaker stages multiple sequences of hallucinatory waking dreams and nightmares as set pieces breaking up a tale of lost souls wandering through memories and recalling dreams and falling in and out of love and hate. Petrov (Semyon Serzin) might board a bus to nowhere in particular, hacking and coughing with some kind of flu, but everyone here seems to be sick with some illness.
Whatever the disease is, it doesn’t manifest as Petrov’s does, exerting forcefully from his respiratory system, but it does appear in other curious ways. A woman on that same bus seems almost mad in the head as she reminds everyone else to show proof of their fare, even though such things are of no concern to her. This particular bus seems to be packed to the gills with the obscenely wealthy, who are then taken forcefully off the bus, rounded up in front of a wall, and shot – unwittingly, it seems, with the help of Petrov, who is handed an assault rifle and barely informed of his job here. What is striking about the entire scene is how Serebrennikov frames it as the punch line to an extended joke.
What that joke is proceeds to unravel its point over the course of the next two-and-a-half hours in this wacked-out extravaganza following Petrov, a graphic novelist, and his estranged wife Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), a librarian whose outward stoicism masks a seething anger for abusive and power-hungry men. Petrov’s sickness seems to carry over to their son (Vladislav Semiletkov), whose party plans on this most eventful of New Year’s Eves are forcibly disrupted by a dangerously high, 103-degree fever. Promising his son that the festivities will go on, Petrov journeys to find a solution. What he finds, though, is an urban nightmare and, perhaps, a truth about this particular epidemic that goes beyond the medical and well into the existential.
In many ways, then, the stressful editing of this relentless project – at least for the first and second acts – mirrors the experience of an actual flu. The cinematography by Vladislav Opelyants switches between widescreen, for the main narrative, and the boxy Academy ratio, during Petrov’s remembrances of his own childhood, finally settling on lovely, full-frame black-and-white photography for an extended flashback. It is all part and parcel with a unified vision, though, so frightening that one might forget to laugh at both the absurdity and the ambition of its director’s intentions.
As for the actual story, well, the movie is not about banal stuff like that. For posterity, though, on the sidelines of Petrov’s odyssey, Petrova is haunted by visions of herself committing brutal acts of violence, both in retaliation against a world that would ignore the crimes of powerful men (envisioning herself a super-powered heroine dispatching of one of these men with frightening ease) and out of desperation for a simpler life (fantasizing about murdering her own son with a kitchen knife, before inexplicably pocketing the utensil). Petrov meets a trio of thinkers (played by Yuri Kolokolnikov, Ivan Dorn, Yuri Borisov) who are both belligerent and passionate about the state of Russian democracy and the world at large and their current pandemic and a whole lot of other things, and their words enter the unceasing swirl of ideas being thrown at the wall by the filmmaker. In the final stretch, an actress (Yulia Peresild) finds love and a connection to the main story through a chance encounter.
Perhaps now is the best time to discuss Serebrennikov himself, whose politically and socially liberal ideas made him a target of the much more conservative government around the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This film was written while the man was serving house arrest on charges of financial crimes. The pace of Petrov’s Flu suggests a filmmaker exorcising every morsel of stress from his body, and a traditional review of the movie, such as the one being attempted here, might only be able to scratch the surface of this dense work. It somehow juggles being darkly funny and unbelievably sad and reminiscent of fonder times and critical of nostalgia and situationally broad and politically specific. It’s remarkable that any of it works and miraculous that all of it does.
Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
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