Petrov’s Flu (2021, Kirill Serebrennikov)

DNF*

Guy coughing in a packed bus admits to having the flu while a loud racist spouts off – pretty much the worst nightmare of 2021. He’s removed from the bus and given a rifle to execute some well-dressed people, returned to the bus, removed again by a bald cop in a hearse. A guy talking dirty to a child gets his teeth knocked out. A black-haired librarian (the Former Mrs. Petrov) goes Hellraiser-eyed and destroys a violent poet. I think it’s floating in and out of fantasy, displaying the worst parts of society – a dipshit Hard to be a God.

Some good single-take camera tricks, but I did not have the patience for this. After an hour I skipped rapidly through the rest – saw UFOs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a long stretch in black and white.

*I have rules about this sort of thing – if I only watched half a movie, I don’t mark it “seen” on the database, don’t log it on letterboxd, don’t write a blog post, etc… usually I’ll just mention it at the bottom of whatever I watched next, or in a round-up post. But I feel I should mark that hour I watched of Petrov’s Flu, since I never intend to finish it, and file it away somehow. Not gonna start watching the first halves of movies in order to get more posts in, also not gonna pretend this never happened. Setting a precedent, but who cares?

Librarian:

Romance!

Russia turned upside down: