Butterfly Jam

Balagov‘s latest outing is a warm, colour-saturated and sporadically magical and comical family drama set in a tightly-knit community in Newark, but with tension and trauma looming ever close on its seemingly happy-go-lucky protagonists.

It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.

At its best and worst, Butterfly Jam unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

Butterfly Jam is usually at its best whenever Keough is in the room, and the rare moments in which her and Keoghan’s performances click perhaps offer a glimmer of what might have been.

Balagov is a fearless filmmaker, unafraid of showing what many directors would avoid. And while that uncompromising spirit has served him well in the past, here it seems that some self-imposed guidelines would’ve spared him from crafting something so purposelessly unpleasant.