Kantemir Balagov brilliantly deploys shock tactics to weigh the horrors of peace against the trauma of war in 1945 Leningrad
Individuals in shock, a nation in shock, a movie in shock – and, by the end, in fact, its audience in shock. These are the states of mind to be experienced in this brutal and brilliant film by 27-year-old
Russian director and co-writer Kantemir Balagov. He finds a spiritual world of PTSD with his movie set in Leningrad just after the end of the second world war, inspired by The Unwomanly Face of War, the 1985 oral history of Soviet women’s wartime experiences by Svetlana Alexievich. His movie has absorbed the influence of Alexander Sokurov (with whom Balagov in fact studied) and Aleksei German; but Balagov is a fiercely individual and quite staggeringly accomplished talent.
In the shabby, dreary, numbed city of Leningrad in the autumn of 1945 two young women have found friendship and an intense bond in simply having together survived, in the pure happenstance of having avoided death – or wondering if they have in fact avoided it. Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) is a tall, ethereal young woman who works as a nurse in a military hospital; her height and an odd baby-giraffe ungainliness has earned her the nickname “Dilda”, or “Beanpole”.