OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
Petrov’s Fever, by Kirill Serebrennikov, which will be released in theaters on 1er December, will remain as one of the most astonishing films of the Cannes competition: this sound, talkative work, constantly mixing reality and the delirious life of the characters, puts the spectator to the test and leads him, for more than two hours, in a mental journey, a real trip cinematographic. Adapted from the novel by Alexei Salnikov The Petrovs, the flu, etc. (éditions des Syrtes, 2020), the film takes up its deconstructed narrative structure, between contemporary times and childhood memories in the Soviet era, in the mid-1970s.
As in 2017, where his film in black and white Leto, on the underground rock scene, was in competition, the Russian director is absent from Cannes. Accused of having embezzled 133 million rubles (about 1.7 million euros) of subsidies for shows put on by his theater company, Kirill Serebrennikov was sentenced, after a Kafkaesque trial, to three years in prison suspended sentence, accompanied by a ban on leaving the country.
In the busy atmosphere of a bus in Yekaterinburg, a city in Western Siberia, Petrov, a comic book author, coughs relentlessly without putting his hand in front of his mouth. An old man who makes inappropriate comments to a 9-year-old girl gets kicked out at the next stop. The colorized image in olive green tones adds to the feeling that everything that is at stake here is not to be taken at face value … Embarked by a friend on an alcoholic spree, Petrov falls prey to other hallucinations. Separated from his wife (Chulpan Khamatova), a less orderly librarian than she looks, Petrov transmitted his flu to his ten-year-old son.
Total show
Between family tensions and hangovers, the film escapes in the dreams or the murderous impulses of its characters. When anger rises, and her eyes fill with brown ink, Petrova is ready to do bloodshed with her kitchen knife. No suspense or cold sweats: the offbeat staging is eyeing Tarantino more, we kill and we move on. Dark humor and smiles.
Virtuosity of the shots, fluidity of the editing, the show is total: we cling to the bar of the “trapeze” and we never take our eyes off the performance of the actors. Petrov draws, Petrova organizes literary evenings in the presence of poets, a man has escaped from his coffin… The number not to be missed is this eighteen-minute sequence shot during which a writer, played by the Ukrainian musician Ivan Dorn, tries to convince a publisher to read his latest work: at this precise moment, the techniques of the cinema mingle with those of the theater (change of scenery, new temporal universe) and create a visual explosion.
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