Petrov (Semyon Serzin) works in a garage by day, but has ambitions as a comic book artist by night, though today he simply wants to get home in one piece, for somehow he has picked up a nasty dose of the particularly virulent flu that has been going around his Russian home city. As he stands swaying, coughing and half-awake on the bus, he appears to be spreading his infection to anyone nearby, but all of a sudden the vehicle is halted, he is hauled off, given a machine gun and instructed to join a firing squad who execute a line of well-to-do Russian citizens. It's as if the Revolution never ended - but it did, and Petrov is soon back on the bus of complaining passengers...
The seems to be a lot to complain about in what director Kirill Serebrennikov did with a novel by Alexey Salnikov, not least in the audience, as it proved wildly divisive; for every one person who enjoyed its rambling, druggy stylings, there were many more who found something to take offence at. That included the Russian authorities, who had already given him a suspended sentence on an embezzlement charge he and his supporters were insistent was utterly fabricated to ensure he would be under house arrest for the foreseeable future and not spreading his anti-Government material. However, such material did make it out of the country, and this played in competition at Cannes.
It didn't have much of an impact, it had to be said, and was somewhat lost in a selection of other, at times equally audacious works that were far more audience friendly, or friendlier to an audience who looked at the Russian "problem" and thought they had had enough of all that. Yet if you were feeling brave, Petrov's Flu, or Petrov v grippe as it was originally titled, might be precisely the sort of cinematic challenge that could clear away some cobwebs in your brain, giddily inventive, completely unpredictable, and cavalier in its experimentation. You could understand why many would bail out well before the conclusion of this two-and-a-half-hour long movie, but there was plenty audacious here.
In Serebrinnikov's attempts to round up all of human life through a Russian prism, he did not merely risk alienating a large section of his potential audience, but appeared to be helping them out of the experience with a swift kick to the rear. Take that bus at the beginning, which we periodically return to: an old man gets on, a little girl gives him her seat out of courtesy, and he proceeds to launch into deeply inappropriate talk about how she would be married (and cheating!) to a grown man if she lived in India, and leapt to the conclusion this meant the girls were the ones who were the "bitches". All of this with a benign smile on his face until he is punched out for his indelicacy and thrown off the bus, sans false teeth. If you could take that confrontational style in the first ten minutes, deliberately making the audience uncomfortable and conflicted, then you would be prepared for the rest.
But the Petrov of the title didn't just refer to the protagonist, who is out of it in the contemporary sequences but not so out of it in flashbacks that he cannot share a passionate gay kiss or blow his friend's brains out with a pistol as part of an assisted suicide. No, he has a family, a young son who also picks up the fever and has to be rushed to hospital - until space aliens intervene - and a wife (Chulpan Khamatova) who may be a mild-mannered librarian on the outside, but inside harbours a volcanic rage that may or may not result in her eyes turning black and her exercising her frustrations as a serial killer. As if the film kept grabbing your sleeve and insisting, just one more thing, the last act even spiralled off into a tangent of an actress (Yuliya Peresild) in a New Year's show from Petrov's childhood memories who had her own crisis to deal with, and a habit of seeing men naked: there was a fair bit of nudity here, but most of it male, in a reversal of what you might expect. But what you might expect was not on the menu, aside from its modern undercurrent of anguish and tension that everything was going straight to Hell.
[SOVEREIGN is proud to announce the release of controversial Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Cannes prize-winner, the sci-fi drama Petrov’s Flu, on February 11th 2022 in UK cinemas.]
