petrov’s flu (w&d kirill serebrennikov)

Contemporary Russia is a big, complex country. Writers like Pelevin or Sorokin or Lebedev or Prilepin, to name a few, pay testament to this. Petrov’s Flu, a big, complex film, opens with a scene in a bus where various downtrodden Yekaterinburg citizens are complaining about how much better it was in Soviet times. In contrast to the more elegiac Leto, the world Kirill Serebrennikov conjures in Petrov’s Flu is bleak, cold, alt-Russian, in the Dostoyevskian sense. A writer commits suicide, a meek librarian becomes a serial killer, the dead rise from their coffins and walk. This is a portrait of a society teetering on the edge of insanity and violence, fuelled by vodka and disillusion. Perhaps this helps to explain, above and beyond the psychotically repressive elements of the regime, why Putin and the oligarchs lumber forward into infamy. The Lower Depths don’t have the energy to contemplate a better future, let alone campaign or aspire to it.

Against this vision, in a film that rambles chaotically over the course of two and half hours, are set sequences from the past, which surge up and take over the last act of the film. These visions are beautiful and chaotic, as we return to a dreamy Soviet era moment where the child Petrov meets a young woman who is playing the Ice Maiden in a New Year’s Eve shindig. The camera glides, a la Gaspar Noe, the film oscillates between washed out colour and black and white, in contrast to the dull harsh colours of the contemporary world. Petrov’s parents runs around in an Edenic nakedness, poets come and go, the world is touched with a strange magic.

These final sequences feel as though they might have been a film on their own, and the truth is that Petrov’s Flu, constructed around a conceit that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, is a distended, overblown film which feels both astonishingly self-indulgent and scarily brilliant. It’s an immersive fever dream, the kind of thing which gets thrown out at the first round of an Anglo-Saxon script development meeting. (Although, oddly, during the extended flashback sequences I found myself thinking of it as a Russian correlative to Licorice Pizza.) However, it’s also a film that seems to be trying to get to the heart of the modern Russian condition. The trigger for the flashbacks occur when Petrov’s sick son takes aspirin which is from 1977, which sends us all back to 1977, which is where Serebrennikov’s film posits that this terrible delirium emerged from.

The director has himself had his run-ins with the Putin regime. I am not sure of his current status. But Petrov’s Flu reminds us yet again, in spite or perhaps because of its sprawling excesses, that art is the most effective tool we possess for understanding the complexities of any given human society.