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Leading actress Viktoria Miroshnichenko: woman in shock
Photo: eksystent
A suffocating sound, similar to a choked swallow, is the defining "voice" of the film.
The soft click that can be heard before the first picture comes from the mouth of Iya, an ethereal-looking woman with translucent skin and over-long limbs.
She stands motionless and staring in the middle of a laundry room, while the women around her go about their work, separated by a soundproof pane.
"Beanstalk", as everyone calls it, has frozen.
A state of shock that overwhelms her again and again and puts her body into complete paralysis.
Constant gasping for air
"Now I understand the loneliness of people who have returned from there. As if from another planet or from the hereafter. They have knowledge that others do not have and that can only be obtained there, close to death," writes the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich in her book "The War Has No Female Face" - a documentary montage of interviews with Soviet girls and women who fought on the front in World War II.
Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), who worked as a nurse in a Leningrad military hospital shortly after the German siege, is also a former Red Army soldier.
The war is over, but what prevails cannot be called peace.
"The man of war had to become a man of non-war," said Alexievich, whose book, first published in 1985, was largely based on by the Russian director Kantemir Balagov.
In "Bohnenstange" the non-war is a very special space - also marked on film - with the thresholds of which the wounded, crippled and mentally damaged have to ceaselessly struggle.
The dead continue to have an effect in the (still) living, the present: a collective paralysis, a constant struggle for air.
Iya was released from the army earlier because of her seizures.
She took Pashka, the son of her best friend who was born in the last years of the war, with her from the front and raised it lovingly in a communal shelter.
But when Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) - agile, impetuous and a good two heads smaller than the insect-like spindle Iya - returns to Leningrad, the little boy is dead. The pain of the loss and the guilt of the friend leave a dangerous dynamic between the survivors Dominance, addiction and love grow.
Over a million women fought in the Second World War as snipers, flak gun commanders, medics or partisans in the Red Army.
Balagov is also concerned with their voices, which do not appear in the heroic war stories written by men about men.
At one point he explicitly addresses the disregard that the women returning from the front occasionally encountered.
While the men were honored, the Red Army men’s contribution was downplayed - in “Beanstalk” a rich woman once disparagingly referred to Masha's work as a “supporting role”, and the stigma of the “whore” clearly resonated in the term “army camp wife”.
"Beanstalk" is a piece of history by other means.
Because with Balakov it is only the bodies that speak of war.
Above all, one thought from Alexievich runs like a psychotic trail through the film: "How unbearable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. If it takes a long time, it grows up. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill" .
Masha, who is sterile, demands a new child from her girlfriend.
It's supposed to bring both back to life.
A plan that also touches the line on sexual violence.
Since his feverish debut "Tesnota" in 2017 (the title means tightness), which tells of an incident from the life of the Jewish diaspora in Balagov's homeland in the North Caucasus, the now 29-year-old has been surrounded by the reputation of a genius auteur who is responsible for wounds finds visceral images.
"Beanstalk", which was awarded for best director in the "Un Certain Regard" section at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is his second film.
Compared to the rough predecessor and its reshaped naturalism, "Beanstalk" looks much more built.
The claustrophobic grip of the film cannot be avoided; Balakov navigates virtuously between expression and encapsulation, unleashing and rigidity.
Infected from trauma
"Beanstalk" sometimes seems surreal because the film excludes all references to the concrete story and transfers it into a universal post-traumatic space of experience.
The pictures with their bright affect colors also seem infected by the trauma.
Red and green, set like a stage design and overdriven into poison, are the dominant signals in a palette of yellowish light and dirty white tones (the white of gauze bandages and doctor's coats that are no longer fresh).
But above all with the intense body play of his dissimilar actresses, Balakov seeks to penetrate into the innermost reality of non-war, or to use Alexievich, in "the event of feelings. Let's say - the soul of the event".
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