Review: Beanpole Blisteringly Traces the Traumatic Wounds of War

Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole begins with Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a nurse working at a Leningrad hospital after the end of World War II, making a series of strange gurgling sounds. Her asthma-like breathing is an extension of her post-traumatic stress, which causes her to suffer from recurring fits of full-body catatonia. These convulsions are such a common occurrence that her coworkers have learned to simply ignore the unusually tall woman, or walk around her, until she regains her composure. The film opens in peacetime, but as Iya freezes up, surrounded by strips of bloody gauze hanging around her like party streamers, it’s obvious that the war still lingers foremost in everyone’s minds.

Balagov has set his film largely in tones of dark amber, bright green and red, and filthy yellow redolent of old incandescent lighting—and it’s the red of upholstery, Soviet imagery, and blood that cuts most forcefully through the brightest of those greens. Cinematographer Kseniya Sereda’s color palette recalls that of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique for the way it gives settings an artificiality that nonetheless brings Beanpole’s grounded sociopolitical commentary into greater focus. Iya, like the film’s other characters, feels trapped in trauma. Her psychological state is magnified by the more visible scars of the soldiers recuperating all around her, adding to the sense that Balagov’s hermetically sealed vision of Leningrad only compounds and reflects Iya’s PTSD back onto her.

Iya’s only respite from her overwhelming trauma is her child, Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), who brings joy to her and her patients alike, and for a spell, it’s as if he exists to signal a new dawn after so much personal and national suffering. Then, one night, Iya has one of her fits while playing with the boy and collapses on him, inadvertently suffocating the child. It’s yet another cruelty foisted upon the woman, and one compounded by the sudden return of her friend, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), from war. It’s then that it’s revealed that Masha is Pashka’s true mother and that she sent the boy back from the front with Iya in order to keep him safe.

Masha quickly intuits what happened to her son, though she shows no signs of anguish in the moment. In that sense, her detachment is like that of the film’s other veterans of war, who’ve become so used to death that they receive the news of their loved ones having died with muted resignation. Soon, though, Masha starts to act out, offering herself sexually to random men and displaying an aggressiveness that clashes with Iya’s introversion. At its most evocative, Beanpole illustrates the complex manifestations of PTSD. Where Iya tries her best to hide her lanky frame from others, Masha asserts herself with shark-eyed intensity, taunting and luring those around her. The contrast between the two friends marks a schism that gradually widens as Iya’s worsening isolation contends with Masha’s increasingly controlling nature. Masha’s behavior, a logical continuation of her desire to fight in the war to get revenge against the Germans, marks a wildly different form of trauma than the sort that affects Iya.

At times, though, the film embraces an explicitness that verges on the grotesque. The framing of Pashka’s death as a close-up of his tiny left hand feebly clawing at Iya from under her until it falls limp is wildly lurid, undercutting the tragedy of the moment. Later, Masha, unable to conceive due to a war injury, demands that Iya bear her a child, and numerous scenes in the film’s second half hinge on Iya’s looks of sorrow and revulsion as she’s goaded into sex against her will, with Balagov filming the character with handheld shots that mimic her fearful trembling. This throws off the delicate emotional balance of affection, hatred, and longing between Iya and Masha, spoiling the more evocative ambiguity of their earlier interactions.

Thankfully, such moments of aestheticized brutality, which distract from the carefully threaded character portraits that constitute the film’s bedrock, are rare. Beneath Masha’s manipulations of Iya and her seductive behavior toward men are visible attempts to attain a degree of domestic normalcy, to give her life dimension and help her to forget what she lost in the war. Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of collapse with delicate subtlety. Early in the film, the patients at the hospital play with Pashka and ask him to bark like a dog, only for the boy to stare at them in confusion. “How would he know what a dog is like,” one man realizes. “They’ve all been eaten.” War has fundamentally altered the material reality of those who have lived through it, and the generation set to emerge from its rubble will have a dramatically different understanding of the world than those old enough to have known what things were like before. In that sense, Balagov’s stylized bubble of Leningrad may be less a manifestation of characters’ trauma than the shared vision of normalcy held by survivors who hope to avoid confronting the reality of a changed world.