Beanpole: Intense and Affecting Russian Drama Sees War from Women’s Side

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

Beanpole is the sort of movie where you don’t want to say too much in advance. The director, 28-year-old Kantemir Balagov, delivers narrative information and hits emotional beats in a way that should be experienced, not summarized.

Perhaps the first thing you should know about Beanpole, which won best director and best film in the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar (and was Russia’s Oscar nomination) is that it’s set in the aftermath of one of history’s most devastating battles. That is the German siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), which left as many as a million-and-a-half civilians and military dead.

We don’t see any gun-blazing flashbacks or images of shelled out buildings because this is not a war movie, but a post-traumatic film. The subjects are two young women, set in a world of broken bodies, minds, and society. Director Balagov and his co-writer, Alexander Terekhov, were inspired by Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich’s book, The Unwomanly Face of War, a collection of interviews with Russian women about the war.

We first meet Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) as she is standing in a hospital laundry room in a middle of a seizure, making small strangulated noises in her throat. She appears absurdly tall, looming over the other nurses in the chronic care hospital where she works with the wounded, dying, and those who wish they were dead.

Iya has the pale blond colour and long neck of an ostrich chick or perhaps a Renaissance portrait. Because of her ungainly height, Iya goes by the nickname “Beanpole.” She’s the right-hand assistant of a kindly middle-aged doctor (Andrey Bykov) who tries to provide relief for the wounded soldiers in his care.

Iya, who fought in the war, was invalided out with a concussion that still gives her the seizures. Beanpole lives in a room in a crowded communal house. She cares for toddler Pashka (Igor Shirokov) and one day when she can’t get a babysitter in the communal apartment where she lives, she takes the child to the yellow-walled hospital where she works, where the doctor provides extra rations for the boy. The amputees and quadriplegics from the war joke with the boy. What does the dog say, asks one? “How would he know what a dog is like?” asks one. “They’ve all been eaten.”

All this is essentially the introduction to the two-hander drama that follows. Iya’s friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina, another first-time actress) comes home to Leningrad, wearing her medals on her military uniform, ready to pick up her old life. She learns some devastating news but appears unfazed. In fact, nothing seems to change her constant wide-eyed stare and unnerving smile.

Masha moves into Beanpole’s rundown flat and they become locked in a complex intimacy, a battle of guilt and revenge and a strange kind of love. After years of war, Masha is determined to restart her life. She even lands a naive boyfriend (Igor Shirokov), the son of wealthy parents who guess at Masha’s complicated war history.

Beanpole makes you feel its two-hour-plus running time, with drawn-out scenes full of off-centre framing and claustrophobic close-ups, but there’s an exhilaration in the audacity of the filmmaking, as the boldness of its portrayal of the survival drive.

The movie is also, intermittently, startlingly beautiful, with shots that echo old master paintings, splashes of red and vivid green that emphasize the passionate intensity of the characters and their need to find meaning in the aftermath of devastation.

Beanpole. Directed and written by Kantemir Balagov (with Alexander Terekhov). Starring Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina. Opens February 28 at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox.