Bean­pole

Per­haps the most illus­tra­tive moment in Kan­temir Balagov’s sec­ond fea­ture comes ear­ly, as a group of injured sol­diers ask a young child to do an impres­sion of a dog. Upon the boy’s con­fu­sion, they realise, ​“Where would he have seen a dog? They’ve all been eaten.”

Inspired by the book ​‘The Unwom­an­ly Face of War’ by the Nobel Lau­re­ate Svet­lana Alex­ievich, Bean­pole depicts the new rules of a world thrown off its axis, every char­ac­ter we encounter try­ing to learn how to live with hav­ing their pre­vi­ous lives washed away, and the last­ing wounds, both phys­i­cal and men­tal, left by war.

The most com­pli­cat­ed trau­ma belongs to Iya (Vik­to­ria Mirosh­nichenko), a young nurse and for­mer sol­dier work­ing in the ruins of post­war Leningrad, fol­low­ing its siege by the Nazis. Iya is nick­named ​‘Bean­pole’ for her unusu­al height, and per­haps for the freez­ing fits that cause her to go into a cata­ton­ic state, los­ing con­trol over her limbs and voice. It’s a strange man­i­fes­ta­tion of PTSD, and per­haps the film’s great­est strength is its del­i­cate detail­ing of the myr­i­ad of ways in which trau­ma, par­tic­u­lar­ly over the loss of bod­i­ly auton­o­my, reveals itself.

Iya’s frag­ile psy­cho­log­i­cal state is com­pound­ed when her for­mer com­rade Masha (Vasil­isa Pere­ly­gi­na) returns home from war, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly left her son Pash­ka in Iya’s care. There’s a clear con­trast between the two from the minute they set foot in the same room, Masha’s com­mand­ing nature direct­ly oppos­ing Iya’s anx­ious mannerisms.

From this point, both attempt to work through their trau­ma in dif­fer­ent ways: Iya retreats into her­self and con­tin­ues to fol­low com­mands as she seeks to repay an emo­tion­al debt to Masha, who is almost preda­to­ry in how she pur­sues oth­ers to help heal her­self and regain some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy. Even­tu­al­ly, this dri­ves the women apart.

Their rela­tion­ship is pow­ered by a thin­ly-veiled les­bian sub­text; Mirosh­nichenko and Perelygina’s intense but con­trast­ing per­for­mances make it increas­ing­ly obvi­ous that theirs is less a friend­ship than a ten­ta­tive­ly roman­tic yet tox­ic rela­tion­ship, ulti­mate­ly defined by a strug­gle for con­trol over Iya’s body.

Kseniya Sereda’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy bathes the bold greens of the cos­tumes and inte­ri­ors in a sick­ly yel­low light, dot­ted with occa­sion­al splash­es of red in dress­es or blood-soaked gauzes. The dis­re­pair of the city most­ly exists on the film’s fringes, as its pro­duc­tion design focus­es more on the details, look­ing at the cracks in wall­pa­pered inte­ri­ors instead of the dev­as­ta­tion outside.

While the more explic­it moments threat­en to dis­rupt its del­i­cate study of repressed mis­ery, Bean­pole is a beau­ti­ful, glacial­ly-paced sto­ry of women try­ing to reclaim their for­mer lives. With gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy and small moments of kind­ness and hope, Bal­agov avoids the mis­er­ab­lism typ­i­cal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with a Sovi­et-era set­ting; he charts the range of human respons­es to trau­ma with great care.

Bean­pole streams exclu­sive­ly on MUBI from 11 October.