This post features a runner-up entry in All the Russias' inaugural Graduate Student Essay Competition.
Raymond DeLuca is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Harvard University, where he studies Russian/Soviet culture, cinema, and history.
Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), an oral history of women who served in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, Kantemir Balagov’s arresting 2019 film, Beanpole (Dylda), challenges the patriarchal images of womanhood and motherhood as peddled by the Soviet regime and, today, by Vladimir Putin’s politics of neo-traditionalism.
In no other country did women play a more pivotal role in the Second World War than in the Soviet Union. They took up positions in both industry and (in contrast to most other combatant countries) in the armed services. Their work in all-female air regiments and sniper brigades, behind enemy lines as partizanki, and as anti-aircraft gunners, challenged the patriarchal norms of Soviet culture.
Yet after Germany’s defeat, Soviet women were recast in popular discourse as a forlorn people, who, having endured the loss of their male providers, must restore their homeland. Indeed, in the postwar years, Stalinist authorities pursued a pro-natalist agenda that promoted reproduction as a woman’s sole civic responsibility. This gendered image of national preservation has been revived in the post-Soviet era as Putin works to turn Russia into a beacon of cultural conservatism.
In Beanpole, Balagov dismantles these heteronormative tropes, but in a strikingly subdued manner. Balagov prefers poetry to polemics, understatement to overstatement, as he invites us to reconsider entrenched gender stereotypes. All the while, Balagov’s visual language pays tribute to the greats of Soviet cinema and announces itself as a major force in contemporary Russian film.
The movie begins with a static shot of a lanky woman in a catatonic state. She’s standing upright, stiff as a stick, with an expressionless gaze, twitchingly gasping for air. The ringing noise that fills the visual frame reenacts the sound of having one’s ears blown out. The viewer learns that this “beanpole,” Iia, suffers from panic attacks brought on by memories of war. She works at a local hospital in postwar Leningrad, where she is confronted everyday by the scars of battle, psychic and physical. From its outset, Beanpole resists popular images of “heroic” Soviet survivors.
Balagov’s focus on Iia’s spasms prefigures his preoccupation with wounded bodies, especially those of women. Beanpole is filled with amputees and living skeletons. When Iia’s best friend, Masha, returns from the front, the viewer soon notices a scar on her abdomen from several botched abortions. Her disfigurement lays bare the ways in which Soviet women carried the war with them long after its conclusion; trauma lingers on skin. Even the guttural noises of women’s throats act as a soundtrack to this otherwise quiet film: gulps, gasps, and sobs. Undoing Soviet tropes of gender, Balagov re-imagines women at war as vulnerable creatures—beanpoles. They juxtapose the stoic monuments to Soviet womanhood, such as Volgograd’s The Motherland Calls.
The noble act of procreation, which became an existential imperative for the USSR after 1945, is also inverted in Beanpole. Not only is Iia infertile, but Masha’s only child, Pashka, who was left in Iia’s care, is accidentally smothered in one of Iia’s post-traumatic spells. The jarring image of a toddler’s hands going limp under the weight of the “beanpole” shatters the maternal ideal of the Soviet era. Balagov’s postwar narrative is about infanticide, not procreation. The crane-like appearance of Iia contrasts with the plump look of pregnancy; she’s visually barren, just skin and bones.
What’s more, Iia is uninterested in having a baby at all. She repeatedly hints at her love for Masha, kissing her and tending to her as one might a child. Balagov deliberately keeps the nature of their relationship ambiguous. Subtly, Beanpole tells a story of same-sex love amidst Leningrad’s ruins—a stark refutation not only of Soviet but, equally important, post-Soviet heteronormativity. Beanpole flouts past gender stereotypes as much as it does those of the present.
That the film, Balagov’s second, takes such an interest in women’s experiences of war shouldn’t come as a surprise. Balagov’s debut, Closeness (Tesnota, 2017), follows a young Jewish woman, Ilana, as she attempts to rescue her brother from terrorists during the Second Chechen War in 1998. She defies the gender stereotypes of her conservative family to save her sibling while preserving her independence. These films make political commentaries, without comprising Balagov’s artistry.
Beanpole is an unmistakable homage to the titans of Soviet cinema. It recreates the static, painterly imagescapes of Aleksandr Sokurov, under whom Balagov studied at Sokurov’s short-lived film academy, which closed in 2019. The film also borrows the gritty realism of Aleksei Guerman’s films, especially in its depictions of communal apartments and rundown hospitals, and revisits Andrei Tarkovsky’s interest in childhood via the long take. Yet Beanpole is never imitative.
The most striking elements of Balagov’s style are his use of close-ups, specifically medium close-ups, and his green color palette. The emerald greens suffusing Beanpole give this unblinkingly realistic work a phantasmagoric feel reminiscent of Christian Petzold’s fairytale histories. Did people truly live amidst such conditions, Balagov seems to ask, or was it all a dream? The medium close-up, too, preserves distance from the past. We only get “so far” in apprehending the nature of this nightmare. Only the dark side of our imagination can recreate postwar Leningrad.
Despite being so rooted in Russia’s past, Beanpole lacks any trace of “history proper.” There are no busts of Stalin, no portraits of Lenin. Balagov favors circumstance over context, micro-histories over macro-narratives. This is a war movie about female outcasts, two “beanpoles,” who, denied their biological imperative in a hyper-patriarchal society, reinvent themselves as caretakers and lovers. The protagonists of Beanpole are more than their maternal obligations to the state. The film uncouples womanhood from motherhood—a bold statement in present-day Russia.
Re-imagining women at war, Beanpole does away with every (post-)Soviet gender cliché on the books and, in doing so, reclaims the potential of war cinema, which, in Russia, has long been politically exploited, to explore the past’s place in the present, and the present’s in the past.
