Petrov's Flu (2021)

This is filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov’s second attempt to adapt the 2018 novel by Alexey Salnikov called The Petrovs in and Around the Flu after first putting a version of it up on stage at the Gogol Centre in Moscow. The Petrov at the center of the story is a garage mechanic by day and a graphic novelist by night played by Semyon Serzin. It’s his sickness that triggers the jumping through time from New Years 1973, when he was a kid celebrating with his parents in a then Soviet Russia back to the present with his librarian ex-wife Petrova (Chulpa Khamatova) and their young son (Vladislav Semiletkov). Nudecomer Varvara Shmykova plays his mother in the flashbacks, a woman who apparently had a tendency to spend the holidays walking around with her boobs, butt, and bush in full view of the family, while Yuliya Peresild also brings out all three Bs with some other unnamed ladies in a communal shower scene just over two hours in. We’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more full nudity from these racy Russians!