Petrov’s Flu

In 2018, Russ­ian film­mak­er Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov was under house arrest, fac­ing almost cer­tain­ly polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed embez­zle­ment charges relat­ing to his role as a direc­tor of a state-sup­port­ed, state-crit­i­cal Moscow the­atre. Hav­ing been released from house arrest in 2019, he is still unable to leave Rus­sia, but is at least doing inter­views this time around – and praise be for that, since Petrov’s Flu, which he shot at night while going to court dur­ing the day, is at once pal­pa­bly vision­ary and abra­sive­ly obscure, an intense­ly expres­sive work which is also deeply embed­ded in a Russ­ian context.

It is large­ly exhil­a­rat­ing, although I have no idea what it’s about – it may actu­al­ly be about Petrov’s (Semy­on Serzin) flu. The title char­ac­ter is intro­duced on a Yeka­ter­in­burg bus look­ing straight into the cam­era and cough­ing a raspy, hack­ing cough. (The film, an adap­ta­tion of a nov­el by Alex­ey Sal­nikov, was shot before the pan­dem­ic.) It’s the end of the year, and Petrov and his ex-wife (Chul­pan Kham­a­to­va) are mon­i­tor­ing their son’s symp­toms before he’s set to attend a children’s New Year’s con­cert and cos­tume party.

The nar­ra­tive expands, viral­ly, to oth­er char­ac­ters and oth­er time­lines, often through ram­bling long takes lensed by DoP Vladislav Opelyants, whose cam­era tra­vers­es mul­ti­ple phys­i­cal spaces and reg­is­ters of real­i­ty in over the course of sev­er­al sin­gle shots. Leto, a sort of true sto­ry about the Russ­ian punk and post-punk scene, was like­able, with a nos­tal­gic core and rock-n-roll ener­gy, but frus­trat­ing­ly deriv­a­tive in all its ​“free­wheel­ing” film­mak­ing flour­ish­es; there wasn’t much in it to sug­gest that Sere­bren­nikov had this much imag­i­na­tive bold­ness and originality.

The first move­ment of the film is its most intense, with the invari­ably dark and grimy frame packed with vir­u­lent­ly xeno­pho­bic and blind-drunk grotesques, and ran­dom acts of well-chore­o­graphed ran­dom acts of vio­lence. When a brawl breaks out at a library’s poet­ry read­ing, the over­head lights strobe on and off because someone’s head is being bashed against the wall right where the light switch hap­pens to be.

This is breath­tak­ing film­mak­ing, but would be a lit­tle hard to take for two-and-a-half hours. Thank­ful­ly, Sere­bren­nikov has more tricks up his sleeve. Sat­u­rat­ed flash­backs in the style of nar­row-gauge home movies take us back to Petrov’s Sovi­etera child­hood and his own trip to a Christ­mas con­cert like the one his son attends; and hand­some Leto-style black-and-white widescreen sequences show us the life of the mar­gin­al char­ac­ter who ends up play­ing the Snow Queen of Petrov’s con­fused memories.

These scenes – and their jux­ta­po­si­tion – bring an unex­pect­ed ten­der­ness and melan­choly to what is essen­tial­ly a lit­er­al fever dream about con­tem­po­rary Rus­sia in all its dark, out­sized, incred­u­lous glo­ry, com­plete with a mangy-dog sto­ry about a res­ur­rect­ed corpse that threads through­out the film.

Join our com­mu­ni­ty of film lovers and sup­port our inde­pen­dent journalism