“You should repent”, told her son, the mother of the main character of Alexeï Guerman Jr.’s feature film, selected at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category, because he was assigned At residence (the title of the film) for accusing the mayor of his town of theft. Under house arrest, Kirill Serebrennikov, the director of Petrov’s Fever, was from August 2017 to April 2019. He could not be present at Cannes for the presentation of Leto, in competition in 2018, and, despite his new selection in competition, will not be either this year: he was sentenced to three years in prison for allegedly embezzling funds allocated to a play and cannot leave the country; if he did not appeal, however, he does not repent.
Because it’s good Repentance (1984), Soviet film by Tenguiz Abouladzé that Cannes Classics shows in a restored version thirty-four years after the Grand Prix du jury snatched away hard in 1987 by the cantor of Perestroika, Elem Klimov, from the president of the jury Yves Montand, who did not believe in the repentance of the Soviets, and especially its absence that we find in films from the territory of the former USSR this year. It is also to this work of memory and, if necessary, of possible repentance that the Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa has tackled in Babi Yar. Context, presented in special screening: by mounting images from German and Soviet archives, he draws the framework in which the biggest massacre of the Shoah by bullets took place, in September 1941, in Kiev, thus holding out a mirror to those who continue to confuse history and national novel.
These four films from the former USSR come together in the non-acceptance of a given situation. The hallucinations of the Petrov family in Kirill Serebrennikov’s film seem to be the only (dismal) escape routes. Obsessed, in the literal sense of the word, by a flu that does not let them go – The Petrovs in the flu is the Russian title of Alexeï Salnikov’s bestseller adapted by Serebrennikov (translated into French by The Petrovs, the flu, etc., published by Les Syrtes editions, in 2020), the three members of the family wander between nightmares and reality in a post-Soviet Russia which only has a “post” in name. Shot on private funds only, just like At residence, by Alexeï Guerman Jr. (ironically: the main actor of this film, Merab Ninidzé, played the grandson of the dictator in the film Repentance !), Petrov’s Fever puts Kirill Serebrennikov back in the spotlight.
You have 55.74% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.