Kritiken

Striving to create an auteur landscape of illness and a hallucinatory narrative, Serebrennikov lets himself down with unrelatable characters, sexist undercurrents and, ultimately, an unenjoyable viewing experience, especially for women.

"Petrov’s Flu" is an excellent example of Russian contemporary magic realism, and although it might be a rather lengthy viewing experience, it is an ultimately rewarding one, rich in irony, craziness, and surrealism.

“Petrov’s Flu” is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing. You end up disoriented and unsure of which way is up, but each step you took led directly from the one before: this is a strictly linear account of a journey through a labyrinth.

Serebrennikov takes a throw-in-everything-including-the-kitchen sink approach to painting an appallingly bleak portrait of modern Russian life. It’s arresting for a while, but you get the feeling that nothing would ever be enough for the filmmaker, that he’d still be exposing the excesses and crimes and corruption if he could.

For all its obvious bravura technique, I found this film indigestible, overextended and weirdly oppressive... In fact, it sometimes seemed to me that for two and a half hours ["Petrov's Flu"] imitated the non-surreal, non-imaginative feeling of actually having flu: the listlessly simmering temperature, sweatiness and discomfort in a highly decorated but airless sickroom.

["Petrov's Flu"] plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.

At once palpably visionary and abrasively obscure, an intensely expressive work which is also deeply embedded in a Russian context... "Petrov’s Flu" is full of several motifs which rhyme across multiple timelines, actors in multiple roles, and magic-realist touches galore, like a singing set of dentures.

It sounds a basic ploy yet it’s nothing if not effective, and what’s ultimately great about Petrov’s Flu is how those dreams are realized. Playing out at breakneck speed, it is awash with flights of fancy: outbursts of sex and violence; aliens and murder; sepia-dripped nostalgia; jarring temporal and spatial uncertainty; homoeroticism; etc.

Maddening but not nonsensical, it’s an aggressive jolt of an immersive experience. While not so much a sensory overload as it is a jaundiced portrait of Yekaterinburg in post-Soviet Russia, it’s zany and strange, confusing and obtuse, but for each aberrant fixture, Serebrennikov loops back into his pool of perspectives as we chase the tail of a viral outbreak both literal and hypothetical.

["Petrov's Flu"] toys fearlessly with both the meandering and the fatiguing parts.

"Petrov’s Flu" is not as potent as it might have been. At its best, it’s signature Serebrennikov: ambitious, eccentrically amusing, visually flamboyant. But the film’s radical potential is ultimately diluted by its freewheeling nature.

[A] hallucinatory, deeply confusing but skillfully executed and mesmeric work... For anyone up for a bit of surrealist dream logic and scenes crafted clearly to push the repressive state’s censorship buttons... then this is kind of a hoot and sometimes a moving exercise in nostalgia.