Kantemir Balagov, the director of the much-admired Beanpole, is only 28 years old (and his appearance suggests he could be even younger). But he’s already delivering the studied chops and immaculate directorial control that are par for the course among accomplished directors twice his age.
How intense is Beanpole? How invested, how richly composed, how well acted, how Klimovian, how Kubrickian, how immersive? “Very” on all counts. A psychological survival tale set in Leningrad just after the ravages of World War II, it’s probably the fiercest and darkest post-war drama made in the 21st Century.
Hollywood Elsewhere sat down with Balagov a while back, and it’s fair to say he doesn’t default to the usual animated, occasionally jokey, “delighted to be here” repartee. He sits there and waits for your questions and answers them, politely but curtly. And that’s it. He doesn’t feel he has to augment or supplement. He’s a first-rater and knows it. A mixture of confidence and patience.
Beanpole director Kantemir Balagov.
Balagov is quite the portraitist and, to go by a just-posted Variety interview, quite the film scholar.
Is it fair to call Beanpole gloomy? Yes, but also riveting. I felt sorrow and pity for each and every character, of course. But the tone is solemn and somewhat oppressive. And yet, given the context, this is probably necessary.
Viktoria Miroshnichenko‘s titular character, Iya, is an all-but-catatonic giraffe from whom verbal expression does not easily emanate. Why must she take 30 to 45 seconds to collect her thoughts before answering the simplest questions? Because that’s Balagov’s intention — to convey her destroyed inner state with traumatized expressions, gut feelings and minimal dialogue.
Vasilisa Perelygina‘s Masha, Iya’s best friend, is far more interesting — more expressive and generally more alluring. If Perelygina had played the lead (which is to say if Iya had been eliminated), I would be a bigger fan of Beanpole. In my estimation she’s a natural movie star.
But not Viktoria. Iya is impenetrable and burdensome and, as far as the afore-mentioned death of the child is concerned, inexplicable and even hateful.
The ghastly murder of Masha’s young son is “addressed” but not really dealt with, and I was simply unable to get past this.
Balagov’s idea, I gather, is that if a character is profoundly devastated by war trauma, it’s within her realm to accidentally smother an innocent. In basic emotional movie-watching terms that’s simply not acceptable.