Petrov’s Flu, 2021.
Written and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov.
Starring Semyon Serzin, Chulpan Khamatova, and Yuri Kolokolnikov.
SYNOPSIS:
A day in the life of a comic book artist and his family in post-Soviet Russia. While suffering from the flu, Petrov is carried by his friend Igor on a long walk, drifting in and out of fantasy and reality.
“What the hell did I just watch?” is a statement that can be accompanied by a wry smile or a furrowed, exasperated brow, though audiences may find themselves alternately doing both throughout Kirill Serebrennikov’s (Leto) nutso black comedy Petrov’s Flu.
Adapted from Alexey Salnikov’s 2018 novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu,” this unhinged Russian travelogue collides tones, time periods, and even planes of reality together across a 145-minute canvas that’s as unwieldy as it is playfully kaleidoscopic.
In post-Soviet Russia, mechanic and comic book artist Petrov (Semyon Serzin) has come down with an especially nasty case of the flu, and he’s certainly not the only one. The lurgy is spreading fast throughout the city of Yekaterinburg, also afflicting his librarian wife Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova) and their young son (Vladislav Semiletkov).
In the throes of illness, we observe Petrov’s reality fast beginning to unfurl, as his sickly perspective incorporates surreal moments of dubious reality, vivid flashbacks to his youth in Soviet Russia decades prior, and even sees his sci-fi comic drawings bleeding into the “real” world. As for his wife, she fancies herself a superhero-like killer of toxic men, her eyes turning black when on the prowl, typically moments before she assaults or murders a man, or in one troubling moment, imagines slitting her own son’s throat.
The unreliability of the images we’re presented with lies at the heart of Serebrennikov’s vision – often, randomly, subjects will suddenly appear nude – ensuring that audiences are best advised to simply ride the challenging wave of Petrov’s Flu in all of its confusing, sometimes frustratingly dreamlike non-logic.
Any film about an epidemic releasing in 2021 is sure to invite real-world comparisons, though Serebrennikov’s film isn’t yet another opportunistic cashing-in on the pandemic. It was filmed pre-COVID, though certainly contains more coughs than you’ll hear in any other movie released this year.
The illness of Petrov and his family is really a jumping-off point from which the filmmaker can form a collage of sights ranging from strangely hilarious to downright disturbing. To name just a few; revolutionaries in lucha libre masks gunning down suited-up prisoners, an old man telling a young girl, “You bitches are all the same,” a corpse kidnapping, a poetry reading that descends into violent chaos, a homoerotic hosing down in a garage, possibly the oddest act of euthanasia ever committed to film, and a singing pair of chattering teeth.
That list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the creative strangeness of Serebrennikov’s film, even as audiences may struggle to make full sense of quite what they’re seeing beyond it being the subconscious mental spew of a man hobbled by sickness.
It’s clear that much of what we see reflects the filmmaker’s own frustrations with the Russian state; racism, homophobia, and classism are rife throughout the picture, as are whispers of corrupt governance and insufficient healthcare for citizens.
While some of the wider context will likely be lost on many non-nationals, you couldn’t call his nose-thumbing at the Russian establishment subtle. Serebrennikov has faced dubious legal challenges from the Russian authorities in recent years, culminating in his conviction for “fraud” last year, widely accepted to be a punishment for him speaking out against the state. Going by his fearless new film, though, he has no intent of keeping quiet, making this already provocative and ambitious work also one of courageous defiance.
Yet behind its absurdity and its political critique also lies a deeply-felt family drama that one might even stretch to call genuinely sentimental. Much of Petrov’s hallucinogenic odyssey is centered around his childhood and relationship with his parents, depicted here through gorgeous home video-style first-person flashbacks, informing Petrov’s present attempts to be a good father to his own son.
Serebrennikov’s slaloming between memory, the present, and clear non-reality may threaten to undermine the defined emotion of the piece, but the flip-side is that such a free-flowing approach prevents his film from ever getting too bogged down in its own… anything, over its demanding runtime. That is, save for a lengthy third-act monochrome flashback where the snake-swallowing-its-tail-ness of it all perhaps becomes too wearisome for its own good.
Yet Serebrennikov’s audacious style prevails even then; the oppressive bleakness of the opening scene in which Petrov sputters helplessly on a bus gives rise to less-drab, more spritely visuals later on; the aforementioned flashback vignettes to Petrov’s childhood are especially warm and inviting.
The visuals are accompanied by as idiosyncratic a soundtrack as you’re ever likely to hear; the film’s various songs include lyrics as bizarre and profane as “You’ll tear my head from my shoulders, you’ll burn me alive on the spot,” and “The corpse will screw my wife,” often hilariously juxtaposed against scenes of real emotional import. It’s certainly the most persuasive evidence that the film is, at least in part, a glossy exercise in trolling the audience.
The cast also dives adventurously into the director’s madcap vision; Semyon Serzin in particular is entirely authentic as a weathered man taking the trip to end all trips, helping see out a runtime that’s nothing if not testing.
Petrov’s Flu is pure cinematic punk-rock; wildly audacious, messy, at times frustratingly lopsided, and it doesn’t give a fuck if you like it or not.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
