Mark Reviews Movies: BEANPOLE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 28, 2020

Beanpole doesn't hate its characters. It sympathizes with them, even when one of them goes a step or three too far in trying to find some peace in a life of misery. The movie, co-written and directed by Kantemir Balagov, definitely wants them to hurt, though. It sometimes seems to go out of its way to ensure that they do.

The scenario is painful enough. This is Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during the first autumn after the end of World War II. While everyone talks about finding some meaning and peace in life after a global conflict, which resulted in the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians, the actual opportunities for that seem minimal to non-existent.

Take the life of Ilya (Viktoria Miroschnichenko), one of our protagonists. She's a veteran of the war, who served as an anti-aircraft gunner. Her major injury is almost imperceptible, but it can affect her daily living without warning.

Ilya, a tall and slim woman who garnered and continues to called by the nickname "Beanpole" since she was younger, suffers from post-concussion syndrome. At any given moment, Ilya can go into a trance-like state—unable to move, her hearing overwhelmed by a ringing in her ears or dulled to a soft echo, her breathing transformed into a guttural croaking. She works as a nurse at a local hospital. Ilya has become so used to it that she just continues along her way, tending to the many wounded veterans who occupy the wards of the hospital, when one of her spells passes.

There isn't much to Ilya's life beside work, save for the presence of a child, a young boy named Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), in her apartment—a crowded building where everybody seems lonely and impoverished (She has an older admirer, whose not-so-subtle advances toward her are innocent but clearly trying to fill some hole in his life, and the seamstress across the hall makes dresses that no one in the building could afford). To everyone who knows Ilya, the boy is her son.

She cares for him. She ensures that someone watches him while she's at work or brings him along on the days that no one is available (The patients play an animal-guessing game with him, and they half-joke that the boy can't know how to pretend to be a dog, because all of the dogs have been eaten). Her boss Nikolay (Andrey Bykov), the head doctor at the hospital who had children before the war took them from him, gives Ilya extra food whenever one of their patients dies.

The depressing details of this place and time—from the aforementioned miseries, to the constant reminders of families destroyed by death or separation, to the sight of people cramming into tram cars in the early morning hours, to the obvious decay in almost every interior—are overwhelming. Balagov fills his frame with these obvious or almost subconscious markers of gloom, wrought by the doom of conflict that is too fresh to even consider a day it might be forgotten.

Then, the screenplay, written by Balagov and Aleksandr Terekhov, attempts to surpass its setting in terms of abject misery. It does. Playing with Pashka, Ilya has one of her episodes and slowly collapses upon the struggling, crying child. With a sudden cut, we are introduced to Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), Ilya's friend and combat comrade, who has finally returned from a mission to avenge her husband's death. She has come for Pashka, her son, born on the frontline and entrusted to Ilya. The boy, though, is dead. Ilya never confesses how he died.

The rest of the movie, while still maintaining an authenticity of setting and within its lead performances, just continues to escalate how desperate Masha is for a return to motherhood (She has her own wartime injuries, which have rendered her infertile), how utterly pained Ilya is (She helps patients, who no longer want to live, commit suicide), and how isolated and seemingly meaningless an existence in the place is. The plot, which has Masha scheming against Nikolay in order for the sad but decent doctor to impregnate her friend, is not so much a reflection of ordinary, struggling life in this time and place. It feels more akin to a game of the filmmakers, using almost melodramatic narrative tactics, trying to one-up every misery that befalls each of the characters.

It would seem cruel, in fact, if not for Balagov's refusal to pass judgment on these characters. As ruthless and heartless as Masha's actions quickly become, they come from a place of such grief that we can only decry the plan, not the motives for it. Ilya may be the eponymous character, but once Masha enters the story, she becomes the central figure here. She starts dating Sasha (Igor Shirokov), who comes from a wealthy family and whose mother (played by Ksenia Kutepova) seems to have respect for veterans—until one is in her home, planning to marry her son.

Indeed, Beanpole remains stronger in its smaller details (A scene in which Masha tries on a dress, only to have the momentary escape become suffocating, is potent, as is a brief shot of a mother doing the same things as her lost son in her sleep) than in its larger story strokes. Life in this place is miserable enough without the filmmakers' machinations.

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