Kantemir Balagov's ‘Beanpole’ ‘Meduza’ reviews a moving love story set after the siege of Leningrad

On May 16, Beanpole (Dylda), Kantemir Balagov’s second full-length film, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Meduza’s resident film critic Anton Dolin argues that the film confirms Blagov is a talented master with his own style.

Closeness (Tesnota) may have been 25-year-old Kantemir Balagov’s debut film, but it became a massive sensation nonetheless. Balagov, a student of the renowned director Alexander Sokurov, saw the film admitted to the Cannes Film Festival and draw rave reviews from critics around the world. Sceptics ascribed the film’s success to Sokurov’s support or beginner’s luck, but Balagov's second film, Beanpole, proves otherwise. This film is based on different material and was created with a different producer, Alexander Rodnyansky. In cooperation with the well-known writer Alexander Terekhov, the director wrote his own script for the film, as he did for Closeness. Beanpole proves that Balagov, now 27, is a truly gifted master with his own style who deserves to have his own place not only in Russian cinema but in international cinema as well.

The film is remarkable in part because it approaches a subject that is both incredibly overdone and particularly sensitive — life in Leningrad shortly after the end of World War II — with palpable artistic freedom. Its fresh, unexpected take on the postwar era rests on a set of unexpected characters, most of whom are women. Iya, known by her nickname, Dylda, is a lanky, shy blonde, a former anti-aircraft gunner who suffered a contusion and was forced to return back home from the front lines with her three-year-old son, Pashka. At home, she begins working as a nurse in a hospital and reunites with Masha, a glib red-haired friend and colleague who moves into Dylda’s communal apartment. The two women are connected by a secret about a child who has passed away by the time Masha arrives. Grief is neither the center and nor the emotional climax of the plot, however — it is a beginning, the starting point of the storyline.

Closeness already displayed Balagov’s ability to combine the personal and the factual with the imaginary and the constructed. That film is set in his hometown, Nalchik, but the action takes place in 1990, when the director was just a child, and in the city’s Jewish community, which does not include Balagov himself. Balagov’s gift for merging fact with fiction unravels fully in Beanpole. On one hand, the director recreates a legendary historical period with great care: authentic clothes, posters, and even original trams permeate the film. On the other hand, the Leningrad on the screen is one we have never seen before: there are no signs of Soviet ideology and no portraits or busts of political leaders. The NKVD is mentioned only once — it does not even appear onscreen — and a visit by senior government officials to a fortress comes off as a bit of time travel from scenes of postwar devastation to a world where arrogant aristocrats still walk their purebred hounds through spacious gardens. War changes our perspective on the world, and that is why the director prefers a surreal point of view to a realist one. Before all else, Beanpole is a contemporary movie that allows its director to shed light on his own generation and on our own current epoch: though the war seems to have ended long ago, we somehow cannot end it, get over it, turn it off, and that goes for art and life alike.

Iya and Masha will ultimately visit the Minotaur, the master of the universe. She is played by the only famous actress in the film, Ksenia Kutepova, in one of the best performances of her career. However, the two women have a long road to walk before they reach that destination. Ther path is divided into two spaces. The first one is a hospital — a public and an intimate space all at once with a faint light illuminating its monochrome walls like the glimmer of hope that appears in postwar life. There’s something pacifying in the scene, something Dutch, perhaps something out of Vermeer or Rembrandt. In the hospital, people heal, and people die. The second space is an apartment that has nothing in common with the uncomfortable black and white communal apartments familiar to viewers from Alexey German’s films. On the contrary, Balagov creates an independent kingdom behind the closed door of Iya’s room, a world where bright green and red underlie the nearly Flemish color scheme: green wallpaper clashes with a red sweater, a fancy green dress, red blood splashing from a human nose. People live, they become jealous, they hate and love each other. Simply put, Beanpole is a film about post-traumatic disorders (a topic rarely addressed in Russian cinema), and, most of all, it is a film about how love emerges victorious over pain.

The contemporary Russian obsession with Victory Day, whether one sees it as a salvatory symbol of unity or as a dead end, can be explained in part by the discomfort of building any viable discourse after such a monumental holiday. How can one live after Victory? Where can enough strength be found to return to what is dead? Must we forgive the unforgivable? Inspired by romantic idealism, the director desperately asks these difficult questions and offers his own answers to them in Beanpole. The plot focuses on Masha’s dream of a normal life with a family and children. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that the world’s norms have been altered beyond repair, and Iya must search for new, unfamiliar paths toward the happiness she longs for.

That may be Beanpole’s most remarkable achievement. Balagov’s film rejects the widely familiar dichotomy between highly patriotic films and independent ones that mainstream consumers stigmatize as “chernukha” for their artsy, grisly aesthetic approach. This film is anything but chernukha, though the circumstances (explicitly depicted injuries, trauma, and death) might seem to hint otherwise. On the contrary, this film is infused with light and color, both literally and metaphorically. The quiet, strange facial expressions of the debutante actresses — Victoria Miroshnichenko (Iya) and Vasilisa Perelygina (Masha) both graduated from theater institutes this year — express even more than the words they speak. For example, as the camera moves around a bathhouse where tens of women are washing dirt from their skin and their scars, the gaze of the director makes the candid intimacy of the situation new and strange. To continue the visual analogies above, we can compare this scene with the paintings of Ingres, whose world all men have abandoned, leaving faith in the future to materialize through the cleansing of the present. It is likely important to note here that Beanpole is a sensitive film, and its gaze is not objectifying. This fact may have something to do with the fact that 24-year-old lead operator Ksenia Sereda is a woman, but it certainly has much to do with her outstanding talent.

The magic of this film lies precisely in the female gaze, in how a woman can perceive what appears to be Russian history alone and make it relevant in a global context where artists are increasingly turning to women’s experiences to reexamine war. The popularity of Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich can be explained by this tendency, not by the Russophobia some commentators falsely assume. Balagov borrowed material for the film from her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War. When seen through women's experiences, war becomes something new: it becomes more painful, less heroic, and its focus shifts away from martyrdom and masochism toward the possibility of an end to suffering. The same feature characterizes Alexey Fedorchenko’s award-winning Anna's War and most likely Alexey German, Jr.’s forthcoming film Air (Vozdukh), which tells the story of the female pilots of World War II. Beanpole is also about the fact that there is life after war, and that life may end up being as hard as fighting on the battlefield. This is what the film’s only instance of original scoring — a deceptively nostalgic, wordless tango composed by Evgueni Galperine — offers to viewers as the credits roll, its frequent pauses implying a halting indecision.

Grass as green as Jan van Eyck’s Gent altar or the dress Masha tries on will grow through the pale ruins. The various shades of red that complement it recall not only spilled blood but the ceremonial garments of angels. A story that once ended with crucifixion inverts itself. At the opening of the film, we see Iya and Pashka looking through the dingy window of a tram like the Virgin holding the Christ Child. Their reunion with Masha recalls Mary’s visit to Elizabeth (Iya believes that she is pregnant). The last scene brings good news of the impossible miracle of conceiving a child in a world with no men. Nonetheless, something like the holy spirit still seems to drift through the air.