Beanpole (2019) - Kantemir Balagov

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Originally Posted by scarletlion

Seems I liked this alot more than most people. It's incredible that a 27 year old has enough guile to make any feature film yet alone one this good. And it's Kantemir Balagov's second feature. How does one so young get the life experience, technical know how, intellect, ideas and confidence to accomplish this project? I have no idea.

It's a tale of two women rebuilding their life after the war in the barren, torn apart Stalingrad, but could also be an analogy for how the city or even Russia itself begins to heal wounds and give itself new life after conflict. The film is bathed in a rich green colour palette to perhaps symbolise peace / fertility / hope / a new era etc. The performances by Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina are completely off the charts. They portray these broken women searching for any way to become fixed, if that's even possible. A search for new life after all the death they must have encountered.

Although the final 20 minutes is a tiny bit flawed, this is a stunning piece of work by someone who's seemingly one of the most promising young directors around.

9/10

Couldn't disagree more.

I went into this wanting to like it. I think anyone tries to do that, especially when the film deals with such heavy and morose themes.
But my god Kantemir Balagov not know a thing about women.

I did a weekend of watching Closeness and then Beanpole.
After the first film, I was shaken by how people were claiming this young man to be such a fantastic director. I don't see it. That film tried to be the talk of the town film with it's real use of snuff film footage, just so that there can be a cultural/religious divide. Except why so the real loss of human life as oppose to staging a snuff film to look like what he saw when he was younger that affected him so much?

His sophomore follow up, something I was more excited about due to Obama's liking of it and the setting of the film, is what really sold me on it.
Sadly it was more of a disappointment then his debut.
It tries to explain how women had it just as hard as the men in war, and even more so after the war.
But my issue is it's attempt to sympathize Masha. More so when

[Show spoiler]she decides that Beanpole must have her child, and blackmails her "friend" into being raped for her happiness. The film loses itself completely by then and it's impossible to come back from that and make her a person one can care about, something it does by focusing on her and her plights during the war and understanding her brokenness. It doesn't work.

So no, I don't think Kantemir knows a lot about life. His justification for his debut film was that he said he had a Jewish girlfriend. That's such a lazy reasoning for anything. Laughable.
And now the guy is doing some episodes for Last of Us. Cool. Keep him away from the script, and I'm sure his work will excel. That's where his talents brighten, as his blocking and staging of shots and colour palette were spot on. Writing about people? Not so much.