Kantemir Balagov's second feature 'Beanpole' is a haunting postwar drama, while Levan Akin's latest 'And Then We Danced' is a moving gay romance.
A great and terrible sadness hangs over every frame of “Beanpole,” the extraordinary new movie from Russian writer-director Kantemir Balagov. Set in Leningrad in the fall of 1945, the movie slowly cracks open the bond between two women, Iya and Masha , close friends who are both deeply scarred by the fresh traumas of World War II. You might say they’re lucky to have each other, except that more than once, the opposite also turns out to be true.
Now the fighting has ended, and Iya — painfully withdrawn, spectrally pale and stirring to life only in Pashka’s presence — tries to pick up the fragments and move on. But she can’t move on anymore than the world around her can: Even if the war is technically over, it remains a permanent condition, the only existence anyone knows. You see this in the rows of injured and immobilized veterans she cares for in her job as a hospital nurse.
Certainly the codependent dynamic between Iya and Masha — the feelings of guilt, confusion and jealousy that ricochet silently between them — is too twisted, disturbing and strangely entrancing to be described in terms of a common experience. To put it in the simplest possible terms, Masha, whose wounds are physical as well as psychological, comes to believe that only Iya can give her what she wants, what she needs for life to have meaning again.
Will they ever know this kind of brightness and cheer again, or are their clothes and peeling wallpaper expressing emotions that they cannot? Balagov doesn’t say, but in spite of it all he leaves you with a shred of hope. It’s as though the director were channeling both the austerity of one of his mentors, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, and the lush palette of Douglas Sirk, the Hollywood filmmaker whose 1950s melodramas turned bold slashes of color into a whole new language of feeling.
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