THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
When we think about the great feverish works, we usually don’t take long to come to the Russian authors, and in particular to Dostoevsky. His novels, like Humiliated and Offended (1861) or Crime and Punishment (1866), seemed to be told by the fever itself. With her, it is no longer a question of following a story, but of navigating on sight in a perceptual fog that blurs the border between dream and reality, between oneself and the world. In this, fever is much more than an argument: an extremely risky aesthetic bias, that of permanent imbalance.
Adapted not from Dostoyevsky, but from a contemporary author, Alexeï Salnikov (The Petrovs, the flu, etc., ed. des Syrtes, 2020), the third feature film by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov joins this family of delirious works, as if springing from an overheated brain – to which we can add certain films by Federico Fellini, such as Juliet of the Spirits (1965) or Amarcord (1973).
Murderous impulses
Petrov (Semyon Serzin), his titular hero, is a young cartoonist, divorced and father of a little boy, whom the film accompanies for a single day. Suffering from a rifle flu, a dry cough, drawn features, he lets his friend Igor (Yuri Kolokolnikov) drag him aboard a hearse, then into a drunken night. Meanwhile, his ex-wife, librarian, Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), is overcome by murderous impulses, seeing herself beating up a noisy customer or stabbing a passer-by. Besides, is she quite certain that she did not commit this bloody crime, which we are talking about on television? In the morning, Petrov goes to her house to pick up her son to take him to the children’s Christmas costume. It was then that memories of his own childhood resurface, in the late 1970s, in a world that was still Soviet.
Fever is also the torrent of a form capable of reinventing itself by digging new avenues of access to the imagination.
All of turns and swerves, Petrov’s Fever is an odyssey of the consciousness turned upside down in the form of a grand barnum, a trip populated by grimacing figures, bristling with rock shrillings and bursts of voices, slipping with murky gleams in bursts of irradiating neon lights. More than a premise, his faltering hero’s flu is Serebrennikov’s way of mixing multiple levels of reality within the shot. The filmmaker favors long takes walking through the maze of a sticky winter, where each passage from one space to another marks an additional degree of delirium.
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