The movie
Show notes
In a Leningrad hospital, two women deal with the aftereffects of their experiences in World War II, in a powerful examination of trauma by a young Russian director. The trauma that happens to people in wartime is a theme so difficult that it almost seems impossible to portray in a film, but that hasn’t stopped filmmakers through the years from trying, so central and so important is this experience to the understanding of what war is, and why we need to stop making it. The challenge is taken up once again by a young Russian director, Kantemir Balagov, depicting the unspeakable cost to women in war, in his second feature, Beanpole . The place and time are a Leningrad hospital in late 1945. The terrifying siege of the city has ended, a siege that lasted 29 months, and in which somewhere around a million people starved to death. After that, the Soviets drove the Germans out of their country and into eventual defeat in Germany. Now, in the hospital, we meet Iya, a very tall thin woman played by Viktoria Miroshnichenko. She’s a nurse, and the wounded soldiers in the hospital generally like her for her kind and gentle demeanor, and have given her the nickname “Beanpole.” But there’s something a bit “off” about Iya. As we eventually discover, she’s a veteran herself, who suffers from what today we could call an extreme case of PTSD. Her primary symptoms are a sudden gasping for air, followed by freezing in place, as if she were paralyzed. After a few minutes, she snaps out of it. Her co-workers are so used to this that they barely notice it anymore and just wait for the fit to pass. Beanpole is caring for a toddler, a boy named Pashka, that everyone assumes is her son. At one point, unable to get anyone to watch him, she takes him to the hospital ward. His small malnourished body evokes sadness in the patients. They see in him another example of their country’s brutal suffering. What they don’t know is that Pashka’s history is more complicated than it seems. It has somethin
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