The 'Beanpole' director's third feature — and first in English — confirms his extraordinary formal and sensory capabilities, even when his script goes off-track.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
Why Not Productions As earthly circles of hell go, modern-day Newark is in an altogether different, gentler category from post-WWII Leningrad. Still, in Kantemir Balagov‘s long-awaited third feature “Butterfly Jam,” industrial New Jersey proves as vivid and specific a backdrop for wilting, marginalized lives as the ruined Russian city did in the filmmaker’s 2019 masterpiece “Beanpole.” Though it’s the director’s first American-set work, he’s not as far from home as initially appears to be the case: A finely textured immigrant community study that engages meaningfully with his own Circassian heritage, “Butterfly Jam” is marked by unsentimental kinship with the rowdy, not-quite-settled expat family at its center, even with actors as unexpected as Barry Keoghan, Riley Keough and Harry Melling playing the parts.
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