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Dylda

Beanpole
Kantemir Balagov
RUS 2019
139 min
V'19

Kantemir Balagov, who studied film with Alexander Sokurov, is one of the most talented young Russian directors. For his second feature DYLDA, Balagov chose a book by Nobel Prize winning writer Svetlana Alexievich as his inspiration and then channeled her polyphonic style into a tight frame. The result is a striking portrait of two young Leningrad women at the end of World War II. The quiet, very tall Iya, nicknamed Beanpole, suffers from terrible shell shock. In the opening scene, we see her in a complete mental lockdown. Iya’s recurrent paralyses lead to tragedy while she takes caring of her best friend’s little boy. When proud mother and soldier Masha returns from the front, the two become locked in a morbid and impossible struggle to help Masha get pregnant again. Set partly in a hospital where the women work, DYLDA agonistically portrays the debilitation of war heroes. A dark, claustrophobic picture, it’s slightly Sokurovian. Balagov’s own talent emerges in his confident direction of the two novice actresses, who are not just intensely watchable, but also capture the impetuousness and folly of psychologically scarred youth. (Ela Bittencourt)

Credits
  • Konstantin Balakirev - Stepan
  • Andrey Bykov - Nikolay Ivanovich
  • Olga Dragunova - Seamstress
  • Timofey Glazkov - Pashka
  • Ksenia Kutepova - Lyubov Petrovna
  • Kantemir Balagov
  • Alexander Terekhov
  • Ksenia Sereda
  • Igor Litoninskiy
  • Evgueni Galperine
  • Sergey Ivanov
  • Olga Smirnova
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