Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Petrov's Flu
2021 · Kirill Serebrennikov · Petrov's Flu on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for the camera never cutting as spaces change. (camera)
Opelyants's camera glides out of a bus, apartment, or crowd straight into a different space or a fantasy, with no cut ever marking the switch.
Payoff: Without the cut to tell you a scene has ended, you lose your footing exactly the way Petrov has lost his. In the reading: hyalosign. Deleuze calls this a crystal-image, where the real and the imagined fuse so tightly you cannot tell which one you are in.
Watch for sudden bursts of color in a gray world. (light)
Most of the film sits in jaundiced, overcast gray, wet asphalt and fluorescent light, until a black hearse or a white and silver costume suddenly flares with heightened color.
Payoff: The color spikes work like a fever chart, telling you when the delirium is running hottest.
Watch how often Petrov is carried instead of walking. (performance)
Serzin plays him slumped, sweating, and mostly still while Igor drags or hauls him from bus to apartment to hearse across the night.
Payoff: He is less a man acting on the night than a body the night is acting on. In the reading: voyant. Deleuze's voyant only watches and endures instead of acting, which is exactly the passive stance Petrov holds through the whole film.
Notice the New Year's party scenes look cleaner than the rest. (staging)
Costumed Father Frost and Snow Maiden figures recur inside a tidy, almost glowing tableau, while the present-day scenes stay grimy, cramped and overstuffed.
Payoff: The two looks sit side by side and you decide what each one is.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Do not try to sort what is real from what is imagined. Follow the cold hands instead.