“What would happen to a woman after the war, when there is a tectonic shift in her mind, her nature?”1 This is the question filmmaker Kantemir Balagov asked himself when making his second feature, Beanpole, which opens with the noise of somebody choking over a black screen. The sounds continue against the darkness for so long that each viewer has ample time to conjure their own personal, nightmarish visual counterpart. It’s almost a relief when Balagov reveals the source to be Iya, a startlingly pale, white-blond nurse, having a fit in a hospital laundry room. This, we learn from a washerwoman’s lighthearted comment (“I don’t pay attention anymore”), is entirely normal. Another playfully tugs at Iya’s face. It’s difficult to understand how the other women find Iya’s state amusing, but this is Leningrad after World War II, and people have seen worse. The collective trauma of the most destructive siege in history has left Iya and the rest of Beanpole’s characters immobilised with horror.
The aftermath of the war makes it difficult to recover. As hospitalised soldiers entertain Pashka, the toddler Iya has been raising for her best friend and love interest, Masha, they urge him to bark like a dog and then remember, sobering suddenly, that he wouldn’t have ever seen a dog because they’ve all been eaten. When Masha, returning home after fighting on the front, twirls in a new dress, she laughs for just a moment before collapsing into dry sobs. The only character who easily finds happiness is the impish Pashka, but he soon dies, suffocating under Iya’s weight when she slumps forward during a fit. This shot, a harrowing long take that forces us to watch Pasha’s tiny fist tug at Iya’s collar until it hangs limp, is one of many that expose Balagov’s interest in bodies and how they can betray us.
What they betray, in Beanpole, are psychological states so decentered that expected emotions never appear: Pasha’s death has almost no observable consequence in the story. We never see his funeral and Masha finds out casually, after a series of questions posed to Iya as they lay, candlelit, intertwined, on the floor of their shared flat. After a few tears she approaches Iya’s closet to browse through her dresses, because tonight she wants to go dancing. Her emotions, either recalibrated or shattered by her time fighting and prostituting herself for enough food to stay alive, do not surface. If Iya maintains guilt for accidentally killing Pasha, she never speaks of it, merely adding it to the list of things that quietly torture her – the most prevalent being the unrequited romantic love she harbours for Masha. Masha, a graduate of the war, is feral, self-interested, capable of affection but only deploying it when it benefits her, as it does in the case of Iya (life is safer in pairs). Later she tells the mother of her other partner, her childlike boyfriend Sasha: “He loves me.” There’s no “we”, no “each other”.
Masha’s body, like Iya’s, is its own battleground, attacking her with spontaneous nosebleeds and fainting spells that a doctor diagnoses as exhaustion (“It happens to every ex-soldier”). More importantly, it refuses to cooperate with her longing to have a child. Her uterus has been damaged by a series of hasty (likely makeshift, as the knotted scar on her stomach suggests) abortions, and so she begs Iya to be her surrogate. “It will heal me,” she says, although she does not specify whether she means her physical malady or her feeling of precariousness in a world no longer defined by hostility. Trauma expels itself outwardly in Iya’s body, but in Masha’s it burrows inward, creating an emptiness she feels compelled to fill. The women’s mission to impregnate Iya, in context, neatly parallels the prospects of rebuilding Leningrad after the devastation of the war. When a doctor informs Masha that there is “nothing left inside [her] to make a life,” this association is nudged forward. Is Leningrad Iya’s womb, potentially fertile? Or is it Masha’s, which isn’t? Balagov states that he wanted to explore the consequences of war at a personal level, and not “just through abandoned or destroyed buildings.”2 But by concentrating on parallel reproductive drives, Balagov relinquishes the personal, turning the womb into his metaphor.
Iya, as it turns out, is not pregnant – in Beanpole’s finale, she tells Masha, devastated, that she is “meaningless” inside. This is a dubious end when we consider the specific book Balagov credits as inspiration, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history The Unwomanly Face of War, whose essence is durability. As one female interviewee tells Alexievich, “We’d live somehow.”3 Fantasy supplies this “somehow” for Iya and Masha: before Iya has finished speaking, Masha slaps her hand over her mouth, monologuing about how they will raise their nonexistent child. Whereas Alexievich’s women endured, Balagov’s written end leaves us wondering about these women’s chances. In his last shot they cling to each other, a hydra of clutching arms, their prospects riding on the back of a delusion. At least it’s a shared one.
1. Leo Barraclough, “Filmmaker Kantemir Balagov Talks About His Cannes Un Certain Regard Drama ‘Beanpole’.” Variety, 16 May 2019. 2. ibid. 3. Viv Groskop, “The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich Review – ‘a Monument to Courage’.” the Guardian, 23 July 2017.
Bessie Rubenstein studies film in New York
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