134 min | NR | January 29, 2020 | Kino Lorber
Leningrad, 1945. The siege is over, but two women who survived it cannot stop the war from living inside them. What they do to rebuild is harder to watch than the fighting ever was.
Leningrad, 1945. The siege has ended and the city survives, barely. Iya is a tall, fair nurse who works in a military hospital crowded with men the war has broken and has not finished killing. Her friend Masha returns from the front carrying damage that does not show on the surface. Kantemir Balagov sets his film in the silence after the catastrophe and finds that the catastrophe never actually stops. Beanpole is about the wreckage war leaves inside people once the shooting ends, and about two women trying to make a life out of a place that has run out of it.
Viktoriya Miroshnichenko plays Iya with a stillness that breaks into terror. Iya suffers a post-concussion condition that freezes her mid-motion and locks her in place while the world keeps moving around her. Miroshnichenko makes these seizures unbearable because they arrive without warning and leave her helpless in front of the people who depend on her. Vasilisa Perelygina plays Masha with a coiled hunger that the front has sharpened into need. She wants a future and she will take it from whoever stands closest. Both women are making their film debuts, and neither shows a trace of it.
Balagov directs from a script he writes with Alexander Terekhov, and he builds the film around color. Ksenia Sereda shoots the interiors in deep greens and rust ochres until the walls seem to carry the same sickness as the patients. The palette is not decoration. It tracks the two women so that Iya lives inside the greens and Masha lives inside the reds, and the costumes and lighting keep that coding in motion across the whole film. Balagov holds his shots long and presses the camera close to faces. The effect turns every small gesture into an event.
Beanpole refuses the comfort of recovery and refuses the easy cruelty of despair. Balagov stages grief without sentiment and shows tenderness curdling into control without condemning either woman for it. He is a young director and the assurance of the filmmaking is startling. The film asks what it costs to keep living after the worst has already happened, then watches its two leads pay that cost in full. This is a hard film about survival, and it never looks away.