Petrov's Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2021) (Patreon)

If proof were needed that I can never leave well enough alone, I decided -- felt obliged, really -- to go back and finish Serebrennikov's 2021 Cannes entry. Part of this is plain old obsessive completism. However, even though I certainly did not like the 30 minutes of Petrov's Flu that I saw back in October, I felt a grudging respect for it. So many films fail because they are risk-averse and aesthetically milquetoast. Whatever else can be said for Petrov's Flu, it is a work of great ambition. Serebrennikov stakes out a particular territory and strip-mines it for every available resource.

Petrov's Flu is a phantasmagoria, an endless panorama of horrors both personal and political. Serebrennikov, working from a novel by Alexey Salnikov, uses illness and delirium as a diegetic alibi for warped surrealism; our main character (Semen Serzin) has the flu throughout the film, and frequently seems to forget where he is or how he got there. But of course [*BONK* sound of a hammer hitting the top of your head], the flu is also allegorical, a way to describe the amorality and soul-sickness of contemporary Putinist Russia. The sickness is contagious, but no one knows where it came from. Then again, early in the film, random bus riders and street thugs blame the state of things on Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the West, or the influx of immigrants -- "Tajiks and Jews" -- who are destroying a once great nation.

There's no arguing with Serebrennikov's formal chops. The elaborate camerawork gels with his claustrophobic, overstuffed art direction to produce something both decrepit and aggressively late-postmodern, a world where a brief flirtation with democracy and market capitalism only managed to fill the landscape with useless junk, a historical panoply of old Communist signifiers and the decaying remnants of fast-capital. Cinematically Petrov's Flu owes quite a lot to Brazil, but its  WALL*E-like apocalyptic hoarder aesthetic recalls the work of Russian installation sculptors Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

My main problem with Petrov's Flu is that it very much feels like the cinematic equivalent of doomscrolling. There's no narrative trajectory, no sense that anything other than the most tenuous Aristotelian unities are holding it together. (It does go from Christmas to New Year's Day, so I guess that's a structure of sorts.) We are treated to a roving exhibition of xenophobia, pedophilia, unexplained Wagner Group violence, a poetry meeting that comes to blows in the library, a recurring holiday Snow Queen ceremony, and a final-third excursus on the misfortunes of said Snow Queen (Yulia Peresild), who Petrov may or may not have met as a child. The former Mrs. Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), meanwhile, appears to be struggling with some sort of bipolar lycanthropy, sending her into homicidal fits both real or imagined.

The previous Serebrennikov films I've seen, The Student and Leto, were fairly linear affairs by comparison. I fully understand that the nihilistic, unformed, waking-nightmare atmosphere of Petrov's Flu is a fully intentional authorial choice. I'm just not sure what it offers us in the way of insight. It's perhaps more striking in what it doesn't or cannot say -- that Putin has capitalized on the worst tendencies of the Russian people, encouraging sexism, racism, and wanton aggression -- than in what it purports to show. In other words, my previous judgment stands:

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