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The sophomore feature of emergent Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov (born 1991), BEANPOLE’s spatiotemporal juncture is set in Leningrad immediately after WWII. Its title refers to the sobriquet of Iya (Miroshnichenko), a pale, blonde, rangy nurse working in a veteran hospital.

The film opens with Iya stuck in a bizarre catatonic state, the world around her is muffled, foregrounded by her own rhythmic breathing sound. Hers is a PTSD symptom which has invalided her from front-line duty. Living in a Communal apartment, Iya ministers to her young son Pashka (Glazkov, whose ill-sorted big head and emaciated body uncomfortably suggests a tot suffers from malnutrition, a casting job well done), but a horrific accident occurs when she has another frozen-up episode, a young life is put out of his misery. However, audience will soon get wise that Pashka is actually the son of Masha (Perelygina), Iya’s comrade-in-arms and best friend, who returns from Berlin in one safe piece.

Masha effects a more philosophical guise toward her bereavement, but in time, acknowledging that she is now infertile, she will oblige Iya to get pregnant and bear a child (a son) for her, claiming that only a newborn baby can fill that profound void (child becomes a fungible item to quench a woman’s maternal distress). But Iya harbors her own suppressed feelings for Masha, things get even trickier when Masha has a new suitor in the person of Sasha (Shirokov), who actually hails from an apparatchik family.

BEANPOLE sieves through the post-war aftermath with grand discernment (a quadriplegic war-hero has no intention to live; Masha’s own experience in the front line is a tacit, dodgy business that puts young women in unspeakable travail and sacrifice; all those who are fortunate enough to survive the ordeal is rewarded with PTSD as a chronic sequela; not to mention the utter class divide which substantiates the powers that be is too callous and sanctimonious by a half towards cannon fodder) and takes its own protracted pace to map out its two female protagonists’ scarred psyche and mutual dynamism, but apparently, Balagov over-eggs the pudding by extracting as much empathic impact as possible from them. The camera obdurately fixates on them longer than average and their verbal delivery is often deliberately timed in an elliptical affectation only frustrates a viewer’s patience and betrays Balagov’s conceit-boasting.

Whereas both Miroshnichenko and Perelygina are tenderfoots in their feature debut, the former, benefiting from her literal head-and-shoulders-above-others otherworldliness, is able to retain Iya’s emotional temperature in scalding measurement that runs rings around the latter’s affected, dicier oscillation between a friend and a frenemy, therefore renders the two’s reconciliatory ending a tad less heartwarming than what is in Balagov’s intent.

Against the grain of the usual methodology of depicting post-war privation, Balagov’s picture is first and foremost, enwrapped in an eye-pleasing chromatic agglomeration of red, green and yellow, formulates a warm-colored painterliness, often being showered under guttering candle light. Thence the most exhilarating takeaway is that, albeit his whippersnapper’s artistic pretension, Balagov might just as well a new virtuoso of cinematic intimism whose star is definitely rising.

referential entries: Cristian Mungiu’s 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (2007, 8.9/10); Jan Komasa’s CORPUS CHRISTI (2019, 7.4/10).