Beanpole (Dylda, 2019): The Crimson Scars of War and the Gripping Isolation of Women

In the wake of war, there remain hollows within the human soul carved deeper than any ruined building. In 1945 Leningrad, as we face the records of two women for whom life remains a battlefield despite the silencing of cannons, we are forced to ask: Can a human being be saved simply by the fact of having survived?

The film Beanpole deals with the psychic hunger that fills the void left by physical violence, and the tragic longing to plug that emptiness with the survival of another. This is not a simple record of friendship or solidarity. It is a desperate struggle for survival among isolated souls who, unable to stop at merely licking each other’s wounds, begin to devour one another.

🌿 Moments When This Film Deeply Permeates

• Nights when all the world’s noise fades and your own sorrow feels uniquely gargantuan.
• When you realize that the heart that loves someone and the heart that hates them stem from a single vein.
• When indelible past transgressions seize your ankles and tighten their grip on your throat.
• Why you must read to the end: To witness how the attempt of a shattered human being to reconstruct themselves through another attains both sublimity and cruelty simultaneously.

🎞 Note Before Viewing

This work deals with the harrowing reality of the immediate post-war period and includes tragic setups such as the death of a child and euthanasia. It is an art film that focuses on the tension of psychological intimacy and the intensity of relationships rather than physical depiction.

🎬 Film Information

• Title: Beanpole (Dylda / Beanpole, 2019)
• Director: Kantemir Balagov
• Screenplay: Kantemir Balagov, Aleksandr Terekhov
• Original Work: Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War
• Country: Russia
• Genre: Drama, War
• Running Time: 137 minutes
• Platform: Wavve, Google TV, etc.
• Cast: Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Vasilisa Perelygina

📖 Beanpole, A Grotesque Promise Born from the Pit of Loss [No Spoilers]

In 1945, immediately following the end of World War II, Leningrad is a wasteland. Iya, nicknamed “Beanpole” due to her towering height, works as a nurse in a hospital while battling “frozen fits,” a post-war aftereffect. She raises Pashka, the son of her comrade Masha, as her own while waiting for Masha’s return.

However, Pashka passes away in an accident during a momentary seizure, and Masha, returning from the front, faces the death of her son. In the face of the agony of loss, Masha, instead of grieving, proposes a bizarre arrangement: that Iya bear a child in her stead, as she herself has become infertile. This request soon devolves into coercion and blackmail, and the two women begin to sink into a complex emotional cycle of mutual destruction and salvation.

🟢 Mise-en-scène of Green and Red: Repressed Desire and Vitality in <Beanpole>

The film’s screen is saturated with intense greens and reds. This is more than a simple aesthetic choice; it is a symbolic device representing the characters’ psychological states. The green symbolizing Iya signifies a craving for vitality while simultaneously representing stagnant isolation, while the red symbolizing Masha signifies both the bloodstains of war and unceasing desire.

The process of these two colors clashing and blending visualizes the way the two women trespass across each other’s boundaries and colonize each other’s interiors. In particular, the scene where Masha wears a green dress and dances in front of red wallpaper starkly illustrates a maddening attempt to wring life (the future) out of a space of death (the past). Through mise-en-scène, the director has materialized the texture of trauma that cannot be fully expressed through language.

⚖️ Dominance and Subordination: The Bizarre Maternal Structure Reshaped by War

The relationship between Masha and Iya is far too asymmetrical to be defined by the word friendship. Using the child’s death as leverage, Masha claims moral superiority by demanding that Iya serve as a “surrogate.” This is a violent form of maternity—an attempt to restore the “normalcy” stripped away by war through the sacrifice of another.

Conversely, Iya, submerged in guilt, allows herself to be instrumentalized by accepting Masha’s unjust demands. The power structure arising from this mirrors their pasts, in which they had to discard their humanity to survive on the battlefield. When Masha says, “I can only be healed if I have a child,” that child ceases to be a fruit of love and is relegated to a “component” intended to cover past wounds, critically illuminating how war commodifies the female body and spirit.

🔎 Reinterpreting the Ending — The Eternal Confinement of Those Who Share Pain

In the film’s ending, Masha and Iya embrace and vow, “Let’s have a child who looks like both of us and raise them.” On the surface, this might appear as a hopeful act of solidarity, but in reality, it is closer to an eternal confinement where they lock themselves within each other’s scars. Masha fails to integrate into the outside world (a “normal” family) through Sasha and returns to Iya, her only confidante.

The tears the two women shed are not tears of healing, but the resignation of those who realize that the trauma they carry can never be understood by others. The child they intend to bear is less a living being and more a ghost to replace the dead past.

Their union is not salvation, but a codependent survival of the only witnesses who can testify to each other’s pain. Following the conclusion, they will live on clutching the illusion of a child, but the moment that illusion shatters, they will once again face the cold Leningrad winter.

❓ Regarding the Interpretation and Ending of <Beanpole>

Q1. Why did Masha exaggerate her past at Sasha’s parents’ house?

Masha’s behavior is both a mockery of upper-class hypocrisy and a defense mechanism. When Sasha’s mother labels her a “front-line wife,” Masha instead exposes her wounds to the fore, striking at the other’s complacent life. It is an act of resistance reminding those ignorant of war’s tragedy that “the peace you enjoy was built upon our front lines,” but it is also a self-destructive act that renders her even more miserable.

Q2. What is the significance of Iya’s “frozen fits” in the film?

Iya’s seizures are a physical record of an individual who was powerless before the massive violence of war. Her body, which stiffens without even being able to scream, symbolizes the silence of all victims at the time who witnessed tragedy but could do nothing. Specifically, the fact that this seizure causes the irreversible accident of the child’s death visualizes the vicious cycle where past trauma murders the present’s future (the child).

✨ <Beanpole>: A Cruelly Beautiful Longing Blooming Atop the Ruins of Death

Despite being a war film, Beanpole never features a single gunshot. Yet, after the film ends, a weight heavier than a cannonball settles in the audience’s chest. This film tenaciously tracks the individual defeats of women obscured by the grand narrative of national victory.

Ultimately, the film suggests that a human being is an entity that can only confirm its own existence through another, like a mirror—and that it is human instinct to hold onto the shards even if that mirror breaks and stabs one’s flesh. War ends with the reclamation of territory, but the war of the soul only enters a ceasefire when the infliction of harm in the name of love stops.

💬 Truth Hidden in Silence

Sometimes, a cold promise to walk together to the very end of hell is a greater salvation than a hundred words of comfort.

Do you have one person by your side with whom you can share your most painful parts? Or are you using the sacrifice of others as collateral to hide those wounds?

💜 Violet Screen’s Recommendations: Further Depths of Female Narrative

• Lizzie (2018): A thriller that chillingly captures the extreme solidarity chosen by two women within an oppressive environment and the ruinous process that follows.
• Happening (L’Événement, 2021): A French film that portrays with extreme density the tension that arises when the female body crashes against social and legal institutions.