Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, the Petrov fever is an adaptation of Estonian writer's homonym Alexey Salnikov. MaG had the chance to discover the film in Paris at the Strange Festival this fall. While this feature film is about to be released in Blu-ray, it is the opportunity to (re)discover this selection of winter. At the crossroads of theatre, cinema and novel, the Petrov fever is more than a hallucinated journey, it's a childhood fragment of the director as of his actors, crumbs of USSR and altered memories of different eras that clash. The fantasy of memory that we know is selective, if not misleading by the prism of time that flows in spite of us. Sublimated by rarely matched sequence planes, the illusion of 7nd Art yet demonstrates a striking organic authenticity. The Petrov fever pierce the epidermis to the heart and die from the inside.
«The human skin of things, the dermis of reality, that's what cinema plays with first »
The director himself acknowledges that it is his most complex film. Kirill Serebrennikov made the choice of an original narrative and initially disturbing for the spectator, immediately hurled into this baroque universe. The tones are sometimes greenish, sometimes violacious and the broad planes sometimes give the impression of distorting the subjects, in the grip of a powerful fever that seems to be winning the entire province. A bus transports passengers across the city and we see scenes that materialize before our eyes, without we really know whether it is reality or a Petrov fever attack. We are talking about eliminating the Soviet leaders and at the detour of a bus stop, we immediately witness a summary execution, without any other form of trial.
The sequence plan seems infinite and we will thus alternate between the different characters (and epochs) to the generic. The cuts are as subtle as they are brief and the realization shows an elegant flexibility, as if floating with the characters. Serebrennikov evokes a « symphonic narration » : « Intrigues are born, others die, some repeat themselves tirelessly, in the image of what is happening in the mind of the person who was caught in the novel... » He says. The Fièvre de Petrov is a technical feat that recalls the best theatrical processes like those that subjugate us in the rooms of Romeo Castellucci. Serebrennikov is also a stage director and it feels mechanically behind the camera.
« In theatre, prohibition is reality. I don't believe in truth theatre. Everything in the theater must be wrong. Theatre is pure fiction, the impossible conjunction of space and time, elsewhere »
Serebrennikov fits perfectly into this theatrical perspective. In photography, her creative partner, Vlad Opeliants, explains the artistic approach at work: « There have been a great deal of technical devices, wide plans, changes in staging, changes in live light, without resorting to any synthetic images. It's 100% handmade, made directly on the tray. » Streets have been completely rebuilt and some sequence plans have had to require extreme rigour to capture the scenes.
One will naturally think of this excerpt from the film (above), where Petrova (Chulpan Khamatowa), a librarian who was somewhat tired of the dread of life, remembered his first youthful months with his partner Petrov (Semyon Serzin). One travelling displays a striking sensuality, like a contemporary dance performance. Petrov's Fever offers a poetic vision of a world from which only flanges remain. His hero, comics artist, is an abyss of the artist facing reality. Fever is as much an escape from the harshness of life as a scourge. Semyon Serzin tells of his perception of filming that he did not really feel like a role as such: « Although my character and I are very different, this film is a very personal story. » He adds:
« I didn't feel like there was a shooting and I was an actor playing a role. I was born in Murmansk, I went to Yekaterinburg many times, so I know well the winter morosity, darkness, alcoholism and despair that are depicted there »
Kirill Serebrennikov did not hesitate to use different techniques and capture devices, old or modern, to transcribe this journey over time. Petrov's Fever, finally, transcribes the energy proper to the one that irrigates the Songs of Maldoror - Isidore Ducasse. The one that animates us in the depths of ourselves. By passing without artifice from one character to another, from the present to the past, Petrov Fever follows a unique thread: the emotion that passes through us or that we repulse. It is felt both in fantasies of love and in the psychopathic impulses of Chulpan Khamatowa. At times, his eyes are filled with an integral black and Petrova leaves his purest intimate violence to express through blind and compulsive murder. More discernment and stakes, the release in the raw state. Petrov's Fever, it's a little bit of it as if everyone was trying to break away from the mental barriers that Life is opposing. A common, contagious and time-limited form of deliverance.
« A writer can only describe one thing: what his senses perceive when he writes... I'm just a recording device... I do not claim to impose "history" or "intrigue" or "scenario"»
The director frees himself here from the narrative constraints of the plot to which the director prefers the virtues of cathartic introspection. A long journey that takes us through a part of ourselves that we confine and reserve inside. From love to hatred, our repressed memories and desires, energy is the only vector that carries us. Blood, odours, an image appear fleetingly. Dreams, nightmares slacent one another. Hope and despair, reality or fiction, how important that energy and vitalism go through us. In reality, we find that Petrov Fever calmed, as at the end of a staggering period of recovery. Like a bleed that frees our moods, Serebrennikov's film marks after Leto a new stage in the filmography of the Russian filmmaker.
« One day, at an end-of-year show, the Snow Daughter took me by the hand. Hers was really cold. Like the real one. »
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