Tags archives: Kantemir Balagov
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5 years ago
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Kino Lorber
Beanpole, the second feature from acclaimed, young Russian director Kantemir Balagov, is incredibly intense and bleak, almost unbearably so at times. Though its painfully drawn out scenes are sometimes hard to watch, Beanpole is nevertheless a compelling and emotionally crushing film for most of its 130-minute runtime.
The film revisits a particularly rough time in Russian history—the immediate aftermath of World War II, when soldiers have returned from the front missing body parts and worse. Though this period has certainly been covered before, Balagov’s approach is novel, focusing on two young female machine gunners who became close during the war and reunite in Leningrad. Their fraught, almost animalistic relationship embodies the suffering each has been through; their peculiar bond is demonstrated in several scenes by long stretches in which they seem to communicate by staring wordlessly into each other’s eyes.
Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), the tall, pale "beanpole" of the film's title, is first shown having a kind of seizure, during which she emits short gasps and seems paralyzed. This state is almost casually referred to as “frozen” by the people who work with her in a hospital tending to war injuries. She lives with her young son, Pashka, in a communal living space that is rundown and faded, but (thanks to cinematographer Ksenia Sereda) full of eye-catching bright greens and scarlets, colors that show up in worn but colorful clothes, in addi[...]
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