In autumn 1945, in a Leningrad military hospital, former anti-aircraft gunner Iia—now, a nurse—struggles with disabling seizures, but still manages to care for Pashka, her absent friend's son. That friend soon turns up, having secured a job in the same hospital.
Kantemir Balagov's film poses three wicked questions. First, what is Iia's illness: clonic seizure? PTSD? The answer is, as Werner Herzog says, the “truth of accountants.” Second, what do we make of Pashka's death (“too early” in the script's arc and therefore shocking)? Are we meant to care about this young body, inadequate to the suffering it encounters, or is this merely Balagov's coup de théâtre, like the televised beheadings in his 2017 debut Closeness? Third, what are we watching? A war film? A melodrama? A buddy film? We start quibbling: not a war film, but a post-war film; a queer melodrama; an anti-buddy film. Not history, but counter-history—after all, so was Svetlana Alexievich's 1985 The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.
Let's instead explore a different path. Balagov is more foundationally responding to two cinematic fathers. If Balagov's debut film claimed European paternity (Dardennes brothers, neo-realism), then the cine-genealogy of Beanpole is more local; from Aleksei German, he has inherited an appreciation of visual hodgepodge, the not-yet-consecrated assets of history, the medical clutter of the veterans’ hospital. Like Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), Balagov's Beanpole is a staging area for future historical significance, as yet unnoticed by its harried residents. And here exactly is the importance to Balagov's color palette: its near-unbearable saturation of greens and reds is the visual language of how memory will come to recollect “Autumn 1945,” an elusive “meaning-beyond-cognition suffusing” everyday life. Time becomes protracted, while space is shortened: Balagov's long takes and close-up shots create an atmosphere of stifling intensity (“closeness,” as his debut was titled) invoking German's claustrophobia among its inherited traits. As in Khrustalyov, the hospital functions as a heterotopia—a hospital, but simultaneously a random inventory: a village; an asylum; a pre-cemetery of future revenants. This is German's heritage.
A more equivocal father is Balagov's actual mentor Aleksandr Sokurov, with whom he studied at Kabardino-Balkarian State University. In coursework, Sokurov forbade three things—religious topics, violence, and watching Sokurov's films. It is not our business whether Balagov complied. In Beanpole, Balagov invokes Sokurov's intense painterliness, his appreciation of filmic surface, and the textural saturation of color as a bearer of significance. If we remain undistracted by specific ascriptions of Balagov's greens and reds to X or Y, we might see instead painterly inheritance as such. Sokurov's perpetual search for “any-medium-but-cinema” often settled on painting (canvas, museums, the fate of painters) as a sacral realm uniquely capable of suspending cinema's profane narrative drive. By contrast, Balagov prefers the plot dynamic with its thick, motivated but unexplained movement, but the painterliness is retained. Moreover, Balagov is no meta-conceptualist: his painterliness serves painting itself, rather than—let us say—Salvation. Cinema—a medium so apparently unloved by Sokurov—finds in Balagov a legatee for whom the moving picture is finally old enough to bear the weight of memory.
