Petrov’s Flu — a feverish malady runs riot in Russia

The actors move with balletic grace in the films of Kirill Serebrennikov, even when they are coughing and spluttering from influenza as in his latest, Petrov’s Flu. Perhaps it has to do with the Russian director’s roots in the theatre. In the new film, it attenuates some of the grimness of a day in the life of the Petrov family, who one by one succumb to a feverish malady that runs riot with their imaginations.

Petrov (Semyon Serzin) works as a car mechanic by day and a comic-book artist by night. His estranged wife (Chulpan Khamatova) is a librarian who may or may not be a serial killer. Their young son just wants to get to his New Year’s Eve school party on time. The film is set in post-Soviet Ekaterinburg, around the turn of the millennium, with a flu epidemic on the rise. Serebrennikov looks into the city’s shadowy corners, where the infrastructure is crumbling and its citizens are at each other’s throats.

The film opens, in typically provocative Serebrennikov style, on a crowded commuter bus full of casually racist and sexist chatter. A coughing Petrov begins to hallucinate and imagines himself getting off the bus and participating in a firing squad that has trained its guns on a group of wealthy Russian revellers. The scene nods to the unpopular oligarchy that arose in the immediate wake of Boris Yeltsin’s resignation as president in 1999. Back on the bus, a man says, “Gorby sold us out, Yeltsin pissed it away, then Berezovsky got rid of him, appointed these guys, and now what? Stinking immigrants everywhere.”

The language throughout is consistently salty; “these guys” clearly alludes to Vladimir Putin. He is never mentioned by name but his shadow hung over the making of Petrov’s Flu, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prize for Vladislav Opelyants’s seamless cinematography.

It is a miracle that the film saw the light of day at all. Serebrennikov wrote the screenplay (based on Alexey Salnikov’s 2018 novel The Petrovs In and Around the Flu) while under house arrest after being accused of embezzlement. The charges, which Serebrennikov has always denied, led to a trial (its fairness has been debated) that resulted in a conviction, a fine and a suspended sentence. (He is now no longer under house arrest but is not permitted to travel abroad without special dispensation.) The trial took place during the day and the director made Petrov’s Flu in the evenings, which adds to the dystopian atmosphere in which Petrov’s booze-soaked, night-of-the-soul adventures take place.

Serebrennikov supplements these with flashbacks to Petrov’s childhood in the Soviet 1970s. Here too there are scenes of commuter travel. The contrast is salutary: instead of belligerent bleating, the talk is of mud baths, cultural outings and the latest government coupons. The chunky sweaters back then also seem much better for keeping out the cold.

This nostalgia could be cloying, but Serebrennikov has a wonderfully sly sense of humour. In a storyline that runs parallel to the Petrov family’s, we encounter a young Russian woman teaching English who cannot help but imagine every man she sees with no clothes on. The object of her desire, a budding actor who recites Asadov’s poetry, is first envisioned with a large penis. But when love wanes, it suddenly becomes much smaller.

Serebrennikov already showed in previous films, such as The Student and Leto, that subversion is part of his lifeblood. In spite of the penis gags, Petrov’s Flu is his most mature film yet in the way it speaks to the present moment of rampant nationalism that has swept Putin’s Russia. The xenophobia that is being witnessed now was seeded back when Petrov’s flu first kicked in.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from February 11