2 Friends Scarred By War Attempt To Heal In ‘Beanpole’

Before the opening shot of the extraordinary Russian film Beanpole , we hear the ragged sound of someone struggling to breathe — a gasping, clicking intake of air that might literally be a death rattle. That someone is Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), the unusually tall and pallid title character, and when director Kantemir Balagov finally cuts to her, she’s entirely frozen in place, at the mercy of a neurological condition that frequently seizes control of her body. At the Leningrad hospital where she’s worked ever since getting removed from the front lines in World War II, Iya’s episodes have become so common that the other nurses in the background barely pay any attention to her. She’ll snap out of it soon. The war has just ended, but an estimated 800,000 civilians died in the siege of Leningrad, and the trauma of those who have survived, including many who are returning from the front lines, permeates the film’s atmosphere like a fog. And the suffering is just beginning for Iya: In a