‘Petrov’s Flu’: Kirill Serebrennikov’s Contagious, Crazed Drama Is Unhingedly Creative [Cannes Review]

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

It’s rare for the last ten minutes of a film to radically change your opinion of the movie at large, let alone your entire viewing experience, but in “Hold Me Tight” (“Serre-Moi fort”), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, director Mathieu Amalric does precisely that.

Director Vincent Maël Cardona uses western Europe in the early-1980s as the canvas upon which he paints his layered and achingly genuine portrait of young love, familial bondage, artistic aspiration, and universal chaos. Unburdened by a firm connection to any one genre or narrative archetype, “Magnetic Beats” tells a simple story with a full arsenal of source music, thoughtful set design, and crisp acting at all levels to pull off this love letter to a particular moment in time.

A man asks the first woman who enters the room to marry him and then is surprised to find she does not respect him. This sums up “The Story of My Wife” from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, playing in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

In one scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” Jessica (Tilda Swinton) and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “In here, time stops,” the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards.

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins.

When teenaged environmental activist Greta Thunberg made her now-famous speech at the UN Headquarters in 2019, she was met with equal parts admiration and derision, likely an unfavorable imbalance toward the latter. For every A-list celebrity who reposted a clip on their Instagram story, adorned with enthusiastic heart emojis, surely another handful of Internet trolls lurked in the comments and left discouraging messages.

The rise in popularity of true crime stories has seen the line between genuine investigation and lurid exploitation become increasingly blurred. With every new Netflix docu-series, podcast episode, and beach-read paperback, content creators are having to go further afield to dig up some crime forgotten to history to recast in a light that often appears oriented for entertainment first, with any richer insights an inadvertent byproduct.

It would be disingenuous not to begin this review by mentioning that, yes, Panah Panahi is indeed related to the titan of Iranian cinema, Jafar Panahi.

A coming-of-age summer romance yarn, “Mi Iubita, Mon Amour” succeeds in shifting the power dynamic within the classic genre archetype, albeit in a way that increases the creep factor.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

“Where are you really from?” It’s an invasive question that’s awfully familiar to people of color, one that intrudes its way into our everyday lives. Though it can have innocent intentions, it’s often hostile and only works to invalidate our livelihood.

Those looking to enjoy “Lamb” from Icelandic director Valdimar Jóhannsson would do well not to learn anything about it beyond its admittedly intriguing premise before watching it — to enter the screening room like lambs to the slaughter, if you will. Playing in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, the film centers on a couple living on a remote sheep farm, where they one day discover an unusual newborn that they immediately decide to raise as their own.

Premiering in competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes, Nanni Moretti’s wild melodrama “Three Floors” is based on a 2017 Israeli novel called “Shalosh Qomot” from writer Eshkol Nevo and begins with an undeniably tragic event. One dark night on a quiet street of Rome, a drunk driver runs over a lady crossing the road, narrowly avoids hitting a pregnant woman, then finally crashes into a building, landing straight into a family’s living room.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIt’s been two years since iconoclastic Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov was released from a 20-month period of house arrest on embezzlement charges widely considered to have been trumped up by the government. If things haven’t been plain sailing since then — the revived case ended in a suspended sentence last year, confining the director to his home country — he has at least been free to roam, work and film in Russia.

Christopher Vourlias Three years after his musical drama “Leto” bowed on the Croisette, Kirill Serebrennikov returns to Cannes’ main competition with “Petrov’s Flu,” a deadpan, hallucinatory romp through a post-Soviet Russia in the grips of a mysterious flu epidemic. The acclaimed director spoke to Variety about living with fear and making the most out of solitude.How did you get involved with “Petrov’s Flu”? I was hired to write the script.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.