Petrov’s Flu is a technical virtuoso drama ★★★★☆

Petrov’s Fluc is only minutes away when the flu-stricken title hero is pressed into his hands with a gun by a masked mobster. With that rifle he executes members of the Russian elite.

Or not. Moments later, Petrov (Semjon Serzin), sweating and coughing profusely, is back on the bus in snowy winter Yekaterinburg where the violent interlude began. Like nothing happened. The execution scene must have been a product of feverish imagination, prompted by a grumbling fellow passenger: “They must put all those in power against the wall.”

But is it true that an older man is thrown off the bus, leaving his dentures behind? A set of dentures that Petrov puts in his pocket and later starts talking to him? Again and again, director Kirill Serebrennikov (The Student† leto) to guess where reality ends and the fever dream begins.

Petrov’s Fluc, based on a 2016 novel by Alexei Salnikov, is an experience that is at times hallucinatory. Serebrennikov beautifully evokes the effect of fever. Without the bad feeling, but including the heated fantasy, the crumbling sense of time, the recurring thoughts.

Petrov thinks a lot about aliens. He thinks a lot about his son, who also has the flu but wants to go to a traditional Russian December party for children at all costs. That makes Petrov remember his own childhood. In 1979, he himself attended a winter party, where a snow maiden impressed him.

This is how it jumps Petrov’s Fluc back and forth in time. Most of the film is set in the 2000s, but it is a timeless Russia that shows the director, wedged between nostalgia and progress. Serebrennikov, a critical artist who was convicted in 2020 of subsidy fraud after a protracted house arrest and a dubious lawsuit, makes full reference to Russian film history, such as Andrei Tarkovsky’s ethereal science fiction.

Yet the film is most indebted to the absurdism of Russian writers such as Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). Serebrennikov thus embroiders on the surrealistic episodes from leto (2018), his beautiful, bouncy account of the music scene in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Petrov’s Fluc is more grim in tone, but at the same time full of humor. Take the gathering of amateur poets, which degenerates into a brawl because a poem about slow whales is considered too long-winded.

Not everything works. The storyline surrounding Petrov’s ex-wife, who turns out to be a murderous superhero, is weak. But in the end many elements of this technically virtuoso drama fall into place in an enchanting way. Then it turns out Petrov’s Fluc much more than a fever trip: it is also a veritable, haunting quest for everyday wonders.