Petrov’s Flu review – feverish tale of a pandemic and societal breakdown

Kirill Serebrennikov's prescient and audacious but oppressive drama is set in a post-Soviet Russia in the grip of a flu epidemic

Kirill Serebrennikov is the Russian theatre and film director whose work now makes its second appearance in the Cannes competition, and who, for the second time, has been effectively forbidden from coming in person, owing to his status as a courageous anti-government protester. For his previous film, Leto, he was under house arrest, and he now has a suspended sentence for charges that are clearly politically motivated. He is a remarkable figure, and it would have been agreeable to give a warm greeting to this already much admired, frenetically energetic new film, based on a novel by Russian author Alexei Salnikov, The Petrovs in and Around the Flu.

It is set in a post-Soviet Russia in the grip of a flu epidemic and complete social breakdown, with people muttering how things were better before the country was ruined by Gorby" and then finished off by Yeltsin. The narrative motif of a flu epidemic is shrewd and prescient, and the flu symptom hallucination" imagery is fierce.