Petrov's Flu · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the hand. A woman's hand, ice-cold, pressed into a child's at a 1977 New Year's party — Marina, the Snow Maiden, whose famously cold touch is the thing the film keeps reaching back to. Hold onto that cold. Everything in Petrov's Flu is a chain of cold hands passed across decades, and the film's whole project is to make you unable to say which present any given hand belongs to.

Begin with what Petrov does, because he doesn't. He is carried. Slung over his friend Igor's shoulder, ferried between buses and apartments and the back of a hearse, he sweats and watches and endures. In the cinema Deleuze called the movement-image, a character perceives a situation — sickness, a broke marriage, a country rotting under its own nostalgia — and acts to change it; perception flows into action and resolves the scene. Petrov can't complete that circuit. He has only what Deleuze named a pure optical and sound situation (an opsign): a man reduced to looking and listening, with no action available to discharge what he sees. That makes him a voyant, a seer rather than an agent — and the camera knows it. Watch how often he goes still while the world keeps moving around him, the fantasy sweeping past while he stays inert. Deleuze had a name for that inversion too: the movement of world, the dancer absorbed by the dance instead of leading it.

This is why the film's celebrated long takes matter, and why they are not just virtuosity. Opelyants's camera glides out of a crowded bus, into a fantasy of a firing squad mowing down passengers, and back, without the cut that would normally announce "now we are dreaming." Withhold that cut and you withhold the viewer's footing. What you get is Deleuze's crystal-image (the hyalosign): present and hallucination fused so tightly they can no longer be told apart, the actual and the virtual trading places inside a single mirror. The bus rant doesn't illustrate Petrov's mind; it composes a scene that then replaces the real bus — a crystalline description, an image that builds its own object and substitutes it for the world. You only learn, belatedly, that what you watched was lived, imagined, or remembered. The film makes that uncertainty its grammar.

And the 1977 party is not a flashback in the ordinary sense. A flashback — Deleuze's recollection-image — is dated: you visit a former present and come back. Here the Soviet party never recedes into "back then." It stays live, a sheet of past coexisting with the present, connected to it by Marina's cold hand reaching forward through time. The dramatic engine, the dossier tells us, is the slow recognition that threads we took for unrelated delirium are bound by memory and that chain of cold hands. That is the order of time made visible: not a line but a set of layers you move through, where the deepest stratum touches the surface.

Meanwhile Petrova, the mild librarian, harbors lurid fantasies of bloody vengeance that play as giallo horror, then dissolve back into the drab. Don't ask which Petrova is real. Both are presented as true — falsifying narration, the powers of the false, where mutually exclusive versions are held as co-existing rather than corrected. The film never lets the camera lie about her; it lets her be two incompatible people at once, which is a different and stranger honesty.

Notice, too, what the body is doing all this while. Petrov is, in the dossier's phrase, more carried than acting. This is cinema of the body: the everyday, sick, slumped body carrying duration in its very fatigue, the gest of a man too feverish to be a protagonist. And the film as a whole behaves the way a fever behaves — by drift, recurrence, sudden lucid intervals. The screen becomes a brain running a temperature: Deleuze's noosign, the film that thinks rather than depicts, and what it thinks is a nation feverish with unprocessed memory. The desaturated palette — wet asphalt, fluorescent jaundice — is the temperature chart; the flares of fantasy color, the black hearse, the white-and-silver Snow Maiden, are the spikes.

None of this is invented from nothing. Petrov's Flu is a late, maximalist chapter in a real lineage. Its associative architecture — memory, dream, and present braided into one subjective continuum — is the template Tarkovsky built in Mirror. The roving, careening long takes through overstuffed Soviet interiors are German's inheritance, straight from Khrustalyov, My Car! and Hard to Be a God, where the camera is shoved bodily through teeming filth. The decision to film illness from inside the fevered nervous system descends from Klimov's Steadicam in Come and See. The procession-logic of fever fusing memory and fantasy is Fellini's 8½. And the camera-as-drifting-consciousness in desaturated long takes is Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. Serebrennikov's own invention is to weld these into a contagion: the long take not as display but as the abolition of the cut that keeps dream and waking apart.

What did that do to film? It turned the time-image's most cerebral move — indiscernibility — into something bodily and catching. You don't decode Petrov's delirium from a safe distance; you run his temperature with him. The political charge follows. A people too feverish to act, carried rather than choosing, is a diagnosis the film delivers without a single speech. Rewatch it knowing the cold hand connects everything, and the chaos resolves into an order of time. Then ask whose hand is in yours.