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 clean, idealized look marks this as a memory long since polished by nostalgia.
Once you have seen it
Track every cold hand that passes from one scene to the next. (structure)
Marina's icy touch at the 1977 party turns out to connect to hands later in the film, threads that looked like unrelated hallucination revealing themselves as one chain of memory.
Payoff: What played as random delirium on a first watch turns out to be a single memory reaching across decades. In the reading: order of time / coexistence. Deleuze calls this a sheet of past that never recedes into 'back then,' staying live and touching the present directly.
Watch Khamatova play Petrova as two different women at once. (performance)
She pivots between drab domestic realism and lurid, bloody revenge fantasy without the film ever correcting which version is true.
Payoff: The film lets both Petrovas stand as real instead of picking one and dismissing the other.
Notice when the film quietly stops following Petrov entirely. (structure)
A long stretch detaches from him to follow Petrova, then reaches decades back to the 1977 party, before the film ever explains why it left him.
Payoff: On a second viewing you can see the detour was always headed toward the same connected memory.
Carry this in: Do not try to sort what is real from what is imagined. Follow the cold hands instead.