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. 

leto (w&d kirill serebrennikov, w. lily idov, michael idov, ivan kapitonov, natalya naumenko)

Leto means Summer in Russian. I picked this detail up from the subtitles. In the first twenty minutes of the film, there’s an exquisitely filmed beach sequence, when the youthful musician Victor is introduced to Maik, the world-weary Soviet rock star. The sequence is filmed with a diffuse, black and white grain which feels both nostalgic and like it could be happening tomorrow. The work of the DOP, Vladislav Opelyants, throughout the film is electric, achieving that rare quality, when you’re happy to watch the screen for the images alone. During the beach sequence, Maik sings a song  called Leto; a lazy, going-nowhere verse which drips with an insouciant cool. As though these people knew, back then in Leningrad, that you could listen to Lou Reed singing Walk on the Wild Side, but nothing could match the outlandish dream of being a rock and roll rebel in the USSR. 

There’s something very beautiful about the idea of Soviet rebellion (which reminded me of Limonov who I read thirty years ago). The film is set in the Leningrad punk and post-punk scene. Samizdat copies of Reed, Bowie, T-Rex, the Velvets, even Echo and the Bunnymen, are the currency of independent thought. Rock music is rigidly controlled by the authorities, who have to give their approval to lyrics and control the gigs. In this context, subversion is survival, smuggling the counter-culture in though sly lyrics and a deadpan gaze which hides the beating pulse. The songs are steeped in a Baudelaireian celebration of rock and roll, the home of the lazy, the degenerate, the drunkard. In the latter days of the Soviet empire, they get away with it, and Victor will go on to front Kino, one of the most successful Russian bands ever.

Indeed, if you’re Russian, this movie will have other resonances, reminiscent of Corbijn’s Control. Both Victor and Maik were stars who died young. Leto is loosely based around Maiik’s wife, Natasha’s attraction to Victor, making for a Jules et Jim narrative.  Serebrennikov’s film has a punky vitality which extends to several reworkings of classic favourites. Some of these interventions, adorned with graphic design touches, are more effective than others. A rumbustious fantasy sequence set to the Heads’ Psychokiller comes brilliantly out of the blue, taking the viewer by surprise. But more than these western songs, it’s the subtitled Russian tunes that quicken the pulse. The poetic roots of rock and roll reverberate. Pushkin was a rock star. So was John Clare. César Vallejo. All the young dudes carry the news.