Beanpole (Dylda): A Brutal Symbiosis of Two Women Written in the Colors of Ruin

We often believe that peace arrives the moment war ceases. However, for some, the war only truly begins after the shelling stops. While collapsed buildings can be rebuilt, the fractured patterns of a ruined soul cannot be restored by any reconstruction project.

The ruins we shall walk through together today are Leningrad in 1945, and the inner worlds of two women broken even more harrowingly than the city itself.

📜 Production Information

Category	Information
Title	Beanpole (Dylda)
Director	Kantemir Balagov
Cast	Viktoria Miroshnichenko (Iya) / Vasilisa Perelygina (Masha)
Year	2019
Country	🇷🇺 Russia

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🎨 Beanpole Interpretation: A Space Where Silent Green and Desirous Red Collide

The film achieves an overwhelmingly powerful visual contrast. Iya, nicknamed “Beanpole” due to her towering height, mostly occupies green spaces. Her green is not the color of vitality, but rather of time suspended like blooming mold, or the color of the profound isolation that accompanies her seizures.

In contrast, Masha, returning from the front lines, appears dressed in a vivid red. Her red signifies a twisted will to survive—a destructive warmth seeking to fill her own voids even if it means consuming others. Within the cramped room where these two hues clash, the relationship between the two hurtles toward “encroachment” rather than healing.

Specifically, the death of Pashka, caused by Iya’s post-concussion complications, binds their relationship into an irreversible debt. In the wake of death, only a chilling void remains. The core of any Beanpole interpretation lies in witnessing how they cruelly prey upon each other’s flesh to fill this emptiness.

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🥀 An Embrace of Victim and Perpetrator Linked by the Umbilical Cord of Guilt

Masha uses the pain of loss as a weapon. She demands that Iya, who caused her son’s death, “produce” a new life. This is less an expression of maternal instinct and more a sadistic obsession with recovering her lost womanhood and future.

In this process, Iya willingly assumes a masochistic position. Hunching her massive frame, she silently carries out her friend’s unreasonable demands, seeking a path to atonement. Yet, that atonement never reaches its destination. The bizarre inversion—where the victim becomes the perpetrator and the perpetrator becomes a companion in survival—deepens the tragedy of this relationship.

Do you recall that taut tension felt when the two women touch or lock eyes? There lies a “mutation of camaraderie,” thicker than friendship and more agonizing than love. Those brief moments of silence, where they stare at each other with hollow eyes, are precisely where the film’s most clamorous narrative flows.

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🕊️ Dehumanizing Aftermath of War and the Female Body Projected in Their Relationship

The film obsessively captures how war objectifies and destroys the female body. The bodies of the infertile Masha and the seizing Iya are, in themselves, spoils of war. Society exhorts them to become “mothers” once more to rebuild the nation, but their interiors are no different from the patients in the ward dreaming of euthanasia.

The shifts in power evident in the relationship with the hospital director Nikolai or the encounter with Sasha are particularly intriguing. The men appear to offer a sanctuary, but ultimately, what they desire is merely a woman performing the “normalcy” of the pre-war era.

However, the relationship between the two flatly rejects that category of normalcy. They walk out of the social order constructed by men, claiming for themselves an isolated island where only their mutual wounds serve as a language. This solidarity is more wretched than beautiful, more desperate than hopeful.

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❄️ The Beanpole Ending: Choosing Eternal Isolation While Embracing Incurable Wounds

The final scene, where the two women hold each other and whisper softly, is the pinnacle of the Beanpole ending. They will likely never have a child, and their lives will remain amidst the ruins. Nevertheless, their choice to be together again stems from the desperate conviction that they are the only beings on Earth who can understand this particular hell.

Is this salvation, or is it another prison? It is likely both. As the sole witnesses to each other’s agony, Beanpole and her friend learn how to live on without being healed.

The war has ended, but the reconstruction of the soul has failed. Yet, the grotesque and sturdy bond that blooms atop the debris of that failure forces us to redefine the very meaning of the word “solidarity.” ❣️

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💭 A Sentence I Wish to Ask You

When you cannot move a single step forward without someone’s forgiveness, would you willingly choose to stay by their side, becoming their slave?

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🎬 Violet Screen’s Curation: Women in Twisted Relationships

• Saint Omer (2022): A masterpiece that chillingly depicts the abyss of motherhood and the invisible psychological transference between women, centered on a woman on trial for infanticide and the novelist observing her.
• Showing Up (2023): Explores the relationship between two female artists who subtly clash and unite between artistic achievement and daily fatigue. It is a work where the aesthetics of subtle nerves and touch shine over violent conflict.