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

51/100

Certainly arresting, which is more than I can say for Leto (or what I saw of The Student). What’s more, it’s operating in the same surreally caustic “playground” as A Gentle Creature, my favorite Russia-adjacent film of the century. Unlike Loznitsa, however, Serebrennikov explicitly designates most of the numerous bizarre and/or horrifying interludes as fantasy, creating a Walter Mitty effect that inevitably undercuts their power; seeing Petrov help execute a bunch of “globalists” means relatively little when it’s clear that he’s just daydreaming in (influenza-addled) response to the stray comment of some racist asshole on the bus. This gets complicated slightly by the way that certain grim events don’t ever “reset” (not even implicitly), suggesting that they may in fact have happened. But even that ambiguity seems unproductive in this context—it’s hard for lacerating anguish to land when you’re constantly distracted by wondering what’s real. For a while, I was able to groove on sheer formal fluidity, thrilling to e.g. the sequence that sees Petrov inhabit a literary character who’s loosely based upon him, changing costume and stepping onto a garage set sans any explanation or signposting. (Afterward, he and the novelist, arguing about whether it’s an accurate portrayal, bust through chintzy scenery into a squalid alley.) That got considerably harder around the midpoint, when we start seeing 8mm flashbacks to Petrov’s childhood, and the last half hour’s shift into a monochrome, “objective” version of that period, depicted from another character’s point of view, left me bewildered about what the film’s overall shape is meant to be. (It’s especially weird that this stretch is seemingly triggered by Petrov’s ex-wife’s primal scream—an image that Petrov is later shown sketching in comic-book form. Are her scenes happening in his mind? We don’t see her again after that.) Maybe we’re just supposed to assemble that shape from the graffiti that shows up in virtually every scene, which achieves maximum bluntness when someone commits suicide in front of a wall that the subtitles inform me trumpets the words “Today’s shitty and so are you.” Okay then.