The term “fever dream” – employed to describe the woozy, boozy, blurred-around-the-edges kind of cinema that defies easy categorisation – is rather overused in film criticism, vut in the case of Petrov’s Flu, with its sickly delirium, baffling hallucinogenic tangents and a central character who spends most of the film coughing his lungs out, it is entirely fitting. Long, disorientating takes, with camerawork that oozes rather than flows, like slowly congealing blood, switch us from despairing buses crammed with passengers, germs and cigarette smoke to grotesque children’s parties, a memory twisted in Petrov’s (Semyon Serzin) overheated brain.
The film unfolds over the course of what might be a day but could be decades, in post-Soviet Russia. Petrov, a comic-book artist, is semi-separated from his wife, Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), a librarian who has violent fantasies of retribution exacted on members of the local poetry club. Or perhaps the fantasies bleed into reality and she genuinely is soaked in the blood of a customer whose lending history aroused her ire.
Like much in this heady, unsavoury film, Petrova’s extracurricular activities are open to multiple interpretations. It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.
