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| Vera Mirochnichenko as Beanpole. Beanpole (Дылда) 2019. |
New: Beanpole has been selected by the Russian Oscar Committee to compete for the Academy Awards as a foreign-language film from Russia.
NB. The film will be shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 9, 2019.
NB. The film will be shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 9, 2019.
Film Program Note:
Conversation with Kantemir
Balagov
What follows was adapted from a 45-minute interview, via Skype, that took place on 10 July 2019 and was arranged by the Telluride International Film Festival. Published in Telluride Festival's FILM WATCH 2019. Click here for a PDF. The film had its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and will start appearing in US theaters on 29 January 2020.
GRISHA FREIDIN: This will be a conversation across centuries
and continents. I was born deep in the 20th century in Moscow a year after the end of WWII and
have lived in California for forty plus years; you are twenty– eight and grew
up in Nalchik in the North Caucasus, more than a thousand miles south of Moscow. For me, your film
was striking, first of all, because you were able to look at Russia’s holy of
holies — the Great Patriotic War, the Blockade of Leningrad — in a totally new
way: a story of two young women veterans making a go at normal life in the fall
1945, in subpolar Leningrad. This is both daring and symptomatic. It is daring
for a man who grew up at the periphery of Russia, whose last name is not
Russian, to take on a central, defining moment for the country’s self-image, even
the legitimacy of its state, and to challenge its deepest dogma. Symptomatic,
because in Russia (as elsewhere) the center doesn’t hold, and a new strong
vision comes, like a hundred years ago, from the country’s periphery. What
moved you to make this film?
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| Kantemir Balagov |
KANTEMIR BALAGOV: Thank you. What moved me first was of
course my self-confidence. Sooner or later, it will play a trick on me. But jokes
aside, it all began in 2015 when I read Aleksievich’s Unwomanly Face of War.
I was dumbstruck. I realized I was totally ignorant: I understood nothing about
the war, neither about the feats of courage, nor the evil perpetrated. But the
greatest revelation was the actual role that women played in the war. I had absorbed
the stereotype that women served only as medical personnel or, in any case, stayed
away from combat. Wrong! I had no idea what they had to go through, the
tectonic inner shift they had to undergo, the biological, psychological shift. Мen, too. A human being, a
biological being, who can generate life, enters war and gets totally surrounded
by death. How can you live in peacetime after that? This question shook me to
the core.
I was spell-bound, astounded by this [spiritual]
destitution. I felt my duty as a human being, as citizen, to tell this story.
Russian cinema today is quasi-patriotic, it carries a subtext “we can do this thing
again [win WWII] — we aren’t afraid of anything” and so forth. This was a
challenge for me, because in a war movie, the usual temptation is to focus on
the transcendent: to show the extremes of human polarities, heroism and its
opposite, evil. Yielding to such a temptation would distort the picture of what a Soviet person
was all about.
GRISHA: Like you, I was moved by Aleksievich’s volume, but
her title, The Unwomanly Face of War, is so pointedly fem. In her
thinking, war is masculine. But your war is a woman, because you have given it
the face of a woman, along with all other organs (almost all), and they
function, they are all in play. When it came out in 1985, her book was
explosive but now, after your film, it becomes clear how much she was smoothing
over the rough edges, even though ostensibly she set out to liberate herself
from the Soviet war mythology — that all must sacrifice themselves for the sake
of the state. But she did not question it the mythology of the feminine. Did she
collaborate with you on the script?
KANTEMIR: No, unfortunately or, perhaps, fortunately, she
did not. Her book was more an inspiration, and we borrowed some characters and
some story elements. But the work on the script was done by Aleksander Terekhov
and me.
GRISHA: Is your film an allegory about generation? You have
there a three-year-old boy, Pashka, his mother, or mothers, then characters of
an older generation. In the Bible, a happy man is the one who lives long enough
to see the children of his children. In your film, the child character dies,
the pregnancy turns out to be false. Did you wish to say that your characters
will leave the stage without heirs, that they had no future?
KANTEMIR: Honestly, when I use material from history, I concentrate
on the dramatic aspect of the story. Allegory is something I begin to construct
while putting together the director’s script or while editing the film. At the
beginning, I am interested in what drives history, what motivates people,
consequences of actions, and so forth. Later, when I was looking at the footage
at the editing stage, I realized [I had an allegory]; what is curious is that I
do certain things always by feel. I do many things by feel.
I realized that Pashka is for me the personification of a generation
lost. Of course, it is a great misfortune to bury one’s children; for Masha, a
double misfortune, because she did not see him die. But it is obvious, these
people will not leave a legacy.
GRISHA: For me, it is equally important that Masha and Iya
decide to live the illusion, rather than admit the fact of a false pregnancy. Indirectly,
this says something about art, because art, too, is an illusion: it conveys
this thing or that through allegory or another trope.
KANTEMIR: Exactly. The ending is a false pregnancy.
GRISHA: Your film could not have come out of any other
country except Russia. You are a man of Russian culture through and through.
But you deviate from the Russian tradition in one important respect: you have
no saints. You may remember the saying that Alexander Solzhenitsyn liked so
much: without a righteous person, no village can stand ("Matryona's House"). There isn’t even a hint
of one in your film. Nor are there any perpetrators of evil.
KANTEMIR: I owe this to literature. When I studied [for five
years] in Alexander Nikolaevich Sokurov’s film workshop, we had a great
emphasis on Russian and foreign literatures. It was Sokurov’s principle: a film
director must read more books and watch fewer films. He always instructed us,
using his film about Hitler (Moloch, 1999) as an example, that we must always
try and justify our protagonists, because they will be judged in any case,
without us. We must not place ourselves, as authors, above the protagonist. It
is hubris, and I try to avoid it. I prefer to walk on their path alongside
them, not above them. In any case, this is how I see it is done in belles
lettres. As an author, I am always interested in finding motives for the amoral
choice of my characters, in understanding their motivation and showing the
audience that, under the circumstances, they could not have done otherwise. But
the author must avoid judging them from a high moral perch and issue
pronouncements on what is right and what is wrong. Why? Because I myself do not
know what is right.
GRISHA: In your film, there are no prayers, no idols, like
busts of Stalin… this is very unusual for a period Russian film.
KANTEMIR: We were careful to removes the idols from the
frame, even though the art director tried to insist on having them…
GRISHA: What struck me most about “Beanpole” is that you
broke the basic war story formula, one that goes back to Homer, I mean the
masculinity of war. Man goes to war, struggles, endures suffering, prevails,
and — gets the girl. Of course, there was Jean d’Ark, but she was, pointedly, a
virgin. You have none of that.
KANTEMIR: There is a striking film by Larisa Shepitko, Wings (1966), a story of a young woman [veteran
pilot] after the war but it takes place later [than Beanpole]. This film
was a source of inspiration, along with Alexei German’s My Friend IvanLapshin (1985) and Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957).
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| Concluding shots from The Ctanes Are Flying. 1957 |
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| Beanpole (Дылда) 2019 |
GRISHA: You also have “The Dying Swan” gesture in one of the
last scenes, when Iya is sitting with her back to us and tries to take off her
bra.
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| Beanpole (Дылда) 2019 |
KANTEMIR: Yes, of course, it is the same bird.
GRISHA: Viktoria Miroshnichenko, who plays Beanpole with
such power, is the star of the film. Did you shape the film around her, or did
she fit your original concept?
KANTEMIR: When casting, our chief criterion was the height.
For me the main principle here was yin-yang, and not just in the psychological
sense but in the physical sense, too. I needed something striking because my
heroine represents a composite image. Its source, for the most part, are the
characters in Andrey Platonov’s prose: “Yushka”, “Fro,” “Dzhan.” What I wanted
was to find a person of this type in life, and Vika Miroshnichenko is little bit
like them, not 100%, but her actions and the way of thinking are sometimes a
little off, not exactly as in Platonov but enough so…
GRISHA: I understand. She is a “holy fool,” and Platonov’s
characters come from this Russian cultural and literary tradition, but Beanpole
is not entirely “holy.” And that’s the difference between you and Platonov in
terms of moral economy. You have neither saints not fiends. Even your Lyubov
Petrovna, the haughty wife of a high party functionary, who at first attacks
Masha, turns out to be, like Masha, rather soft and vulnerable on the inside. She
says so herself: “We are more alike that you think.”
KANTEMIR: This is exactly what we wanted. We did not want to
follow the well-trodden path, saying that the upper stratum always consists of
parasites and scoundrels.
GRISHA: You’ve succeeded.
KANTEMIR: Alas, not everyone sees it this way. On the
contrary, some say that by showing the vast chasm between the top and the
ordinary people, we assumed a judgmental stance.
GRISHA: Of course, you did not. Even her rather
menacing-looking husband, as it turns out, appreciates human pain and feels it.
KANTEMIR: Exactly. He says [after the fracas at the table]:
“Now you’ve met, and that’s good.” Meaning, let’s stop tearing at each other
and move on.
GRISHA: Yes. In Russian, it’s just three words but they
speak volumes! You have extraordinary actors. When Masha explains why she
passed her newly-born to Iya and returned to fighting with her artillery unit,
she says: “To avenge! Avenge!” But the tiny pause between the two words shows
her realizing that she had been caught in someone else’s language, the bombast that
now sounds tinny. Platonov would have envied the emotional precision and the
philosophical depth of her ineloquence.
KANTEMIR: Thank you.
GRISHA: I want to go back to the main theme: how you
re–gendered or even un-gendered the war. Beginning with Homer, men fight, shed
blood, sometimes die, in short, men risk their life in combat, but in the end,
the man gets the girl. Man gets compensated for his valor. That’s the basis of
all our war mythology. But you took your story out of this framework
altogether. Your story does not conform to the venerable pattern, and this is
probably why sex in you film is never right. Copulations are odd, to put it
mildly, and love-making never really works. Did you seek to overturn this war
film convention?
KANTEMIR: Yes. And this is why [in Russian] the film is
called Dylda, [meaning an awkward giant who is not quite bright]. For
me, it signifies being ungraceful, being disoriented, lost in space, but my
characters, befuddled as they are, have feelings just likes the rest of us, and
like us, they have sex and make love, if in a state of bewilderment. It was
really important for us to show this disorientation of life in the aftermath of
the war.
What you say about Homer is right. I despise machismo and
testosterone excess. But this [rejection of the Homeric framework] was more a
matter of the unconscious intuition than by design.
GRISHA: You spent five years studying in Alexander Sokurov’s
film workshop in Nalchik, he is your most important mentor. It occurred to me
when I watched the film, that Beanpole may be affiliated with Sokurov’s The
Russian Ark. There is a scene in his film when, as de Custine tours the
Hermitage, a set of doors opens, revealing a Hermitage storage room during the
Blockade and a curator crazed by starvation to the point of cannibalism.
Sokurov
hastily closes the doors, but I had a sense that you entered that storage room
and went on to shoot Beanpole in the blockade Leningrad, while Sokurov
went on with the tour. Sokurov does brilliant, deep exploration of myths, but
you appear to have departed from that universe mythologies in order to take a
fresh look at the world and say new things. At the same time, you are his
disciple, and you have the mastery of his cinematic toolkit. Like Sokurov, you convey
visually a powerful appreciation of the art of painting. Watching Beanploe
makes one feel as if Hermitage paintings framing your humble characters are
staring at the audience from the screen. This sounds like an old story about
the mentor and the disciple. The disciples always go on their own and take with
them the mentor’s most valuable tools.
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| Alexander Sokurov. Russian Ark. 2002 |
KANTEMIR: What you are saying is very interesting and I will
be thinking about it. I am convinced that Sokurov found Closeness [Balagov’s
first feature film, 2017] not too much to his liking. And I am sure he will not
like Beanpole. He has not seen it yet, but I am 90% sure he will not
like it. I am intrigued by what you are saying there is a lot to reflect on.
GRISHA: Now I want to return to the question of gender in
your film. I live in California and people here, on the whole, are open-minded
about gender and gender-bending. But even in Moscow, as I was growing up in the
late 1950s and 1960s, I had a few gay friends and thought nothing of it. I
think this is how it is in a big city. Do you expect to be criticized in Russia
for your treatment of same-sex love? Will you be accused of the crime of
“advocating homosexuality”?
KANTEMIR: You know, I was very skeptical when we were
nominated for the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, but not because of
some antigay prejudices. I am absolutely tolerant of and treat as normal any
form that love is expressed in. Love should not have gender, and for me, this
is obvious. The Queer Palm nomination, by my lights, tended to narrow the whole
complex of motives that made up my characters. It narrowed their range as human
beings. I wanted my characters to be motivated, not by some form of sexual desire
or other, but by the human, heartbreaking feeling of loneliness. A human being
needs another human being first of all; gender comes second. This is why when
people begin to view my characters through the prism of same-sex love, I find
it constricting. But I am not going to protest against it.
GRISHA: At the time of the film, in that generation, there
may not have even been a language for same-sex love. When I was growing up, lesbian love was out
of the ken; male homosexuality was another matter: it constituted a criminal offense.
KANTEMIR: I suspect, people may not have reflected on what
it was that drew them to each other. Motivation — that was the task I set
before my heroines. But in general, when I studied historical materials,
personal diaries, I did come across same-sex romance among women. So, for me,
all of this is first of all about being human.
Machismo ss a subject for another film. In this one, the principal
heroine is a woman, and I feel very comfortable with women.
GRISHA: You were very fortunate in your choice of the
cinematographer. Twenty-three-year-old Ksenia Sereda was a great find!
KANTEMIR: Yes, it was a stroke of good fortune that was able
to work as a director of photography. Every person has a male and a female
side. In my case, I try to understand my own femininity with the help of my
heroines. I want to shoot my next film about guys, men, and in this way to
understand better my own male side. It is through my characters that, among
other things, I study myself, and this is why my first two films were about
women.
GRISHA: You have a striking scene early on that takes place
in a women’s bath house: a gathering of many nude female bodies. It is very
painterly and brings to mind “The Turkish Bath,” an erotic painting by Ingres,
in the oriental style. But Sereda sees it in a way that is the opposite of
Ingres. Whose idea was it?
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Turkish Bath. 1859. |
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| Beanpole (Дылда) 2019 |
KANTEMIR: That’s curious.
GRISHA: And then, the echoes of Vermeer, his light, the
color that you called in some interview “the rust of humanity.”
KANTEMIR: Yes, the shot of Beanpole in the hospital comes
from Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earing.”
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| Vermeer. Girl with a Pearl Earing. 1665. |
GRISHA: There is also something from Botticelli’s “La Primavera.”
KANTEMIR: Yes, in a way. it’s a composite image.
GRISHA: This is brilliant cinematography. When Beanpole has
her seizure, when she freezes, the take lasts for the duration of her fit, in
real time, so to speak. The effect is that a movie becomes frozen into a
photograph and then the photograph comes to, becoming a movie again.
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| Beanpole (Дылда) 2019. |
GRISHA: Visually, this is a high note, and Sereda holds it throughout
the film, down to the last shot of Beanpole’s profile, when she has a streak of
blood running down her cheek. Did Masha draw blood when she hit Beanpole?
KANTEMIR: This was unplanned. The blood is real; Masha hit
her so hard, that she drew blood. When this happened, I thought, first, that it
would be too much bleeding. Masha had a nose bleed at the dinner with Sasha’s
parents, and now Beanpole is bleeding. But then it occurred to me that if fate
had given me this shot, it must be made part of the final take.
GRISHA: What about the Robert Capa photograph of the two
women dancing in the streets of Moscow in 1947? When I saw it first, I knew I
had to write about it, and I did.
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| Robert Capa. Moscow 1947. |
GRISHA: This is when Beanpole wants to comfort Masha and
begins to kiss her passionately, but affection does not work; then Masha does
the same to Beanpole who has suddenly gone frozen lying on top of Masha. This
time Beanpole is unresponsive. This is a brilliant take on sexual love, a
reminder that there are situations when nothing works out. People tend to
forget these instances, leave them out of the story, because they want to think
that sex has to be as it is in the films of Antonio Banderas…
KANTEMIR: True. But I thought about something else: from the
outside, it all always looks awkward. It is only in in porno films or in the
particularly passionate movies where sexual love is beautiful, gracious, and so
forth. We tried to avoid this approach, as in the scene of sex in the car…
GRISHA: Yes, well done. Two young guys went out cruising,
hunting for girls but it turns out they are miserable, pathetic, embarrassed,
one feels a little sorry for them.
KANTEMIR: They are without malice. And the tension is
resolved by their laughter, childish laughter.
GRISHA: Finally, about politics. You are going against the
grain of the official take on the war. I don’t mean to say that you are taking
it on directly, but the sensibility of the film is deeply subversive.
KANTEMIR: Whether it is so or not — time will tell. I try to
be apolitical. When your art gains in political relevance, it loses in artistic
merit. But there is a political subtext in whatever we do, because we cannot
exist without politics. But when you intentionally go for a political end, your
work begins to suffer from calculation and loses value as art.
Berkeley — St.
Petersburg. 10 July 2019
