Back when art house films were being shown full-time in art houses, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” might have seemed, on paper at least, a middle-class commercial hook-and-eye—the kind of movie that would slip into New York’s Lincoln Plaza cinema and play there comfortably for a while. a month or so. The first hook, of course, is Tchaikovsky himself, the Russian composer who has created works of timeless beauty and so popular that he always runs the risk of being disparaged, in a strange way, like the long-haired Spielberg. Tchaikovsky’s short-lived marriage to Antonina Milukova was a disaster and semi-scandal at the same time, but it seems time to rediscover this tragic episode, which hinged on Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and the fact that he agreed to the marriage as a desperation. Closed strategy ploy. The late nineteenth century was a time when not even an artist of his size could live openly, and women as a “class” constrained in every part of their choices, seemed like fodder for the biographical drama that could touch upon the issues of oppression and liberation in our time.
However, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” is not that movie. Even if there is still a Lincoln Plaza cinema, I’m not sure who the audience will be there. The film was written and directed by dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrenkov (“Petrov’s Flu”). sound Being a film about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Antonina Milukova, with the story of their relationship told from her point of view, is a dark, mysterious and often impenetrable drama. For a while, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” looks like a gloomy Slavic version of “Masterpiece Theater”. Then he becomes a mixed symbol of patriarchy and reactive female mental illness, only to morph into Is this real or is it fiction?? The descent of what appears to be the world’s most pretentious music and video director. The picture is, in short, useless. However, everything about this unsatisfying thing is also strangely intentional. Sometimes he seems to say: Welcome to post-art cinema.
It doesn’t sound like I’m stuck in the 19th century, but what we’re missing almost entirely from “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” is any organic sense of human psychology. The film opened in Moscow in 1872, when Tchaikovsky, in his early thirties, was an established composer and a growing national legend. However, despite his success, he struggles to make ends meet. Odin Lund Biron plays him as a polite but elegant man, conservative in his manicured brown beard, and when Antonina (Alyona Mikhailova), a former student, approaches him, he doesn’t know what to do with her. This is because she is completely and relentlessly fascinated by the composer, ready to devote her very existence to him, and yet, despite her cheerful and fanatical spirit, tells him that she knows nothing of his music or his fame. She is simply…in love.
Tchaikovsky, who shows something close to common sense (the last time we’ll see this quality in this movie), declines her offer of marriage. He told her, half-glass full honestly, that he had never loved a woman in his life. (This is true, but he did not say why). Nevertheless, she insisted, she sent him a love letter that she copied from a book and explained to him that she had been given a dowry of 10,000 rubles that would come from the sale of some. Forest land owned by her family.
Tempted by money and seduced by the purity of her infatuation, he agrees to marry Antonina. But from the moment they stumble, at a party and dinner her sister describes as feeling more like a funeral than a wedding, the union is doomed. As the dowry proves more difficult than he promised, Tchaikovsky finds himself overwhelmed by anxiety and unable to compose. Marriage does not help him – it drags him down. And he never came close to sleeping with Antonina. When she takes it upon herself, she gasps with desire as she approaches him in bed, retreating in horror.
There was one memorable big-screen drama about Tchaikovsky: “The Music Lovers” (1971), which is arguably Ken Russell’s best film — purple in its passion but traditional enough not to drown in its tendency to overindulge. Russell featured the composer’s music, particularly his No. 1 piano concerto, as an escalating—but tormented—expression of his sexuality, and Glenda Jackson played Antonina with a remarkable overdose of soap opera intensity. It’s not a movie for everyone, but what is “Tchaikovsky’s Wife”, a movie that is 2 hours 23 minutes in which there is no moment when we hear Tchaikovsky’s music, and beyond that it almost makes no sense that Serebrennikov has any benefit In Tchaikovsky’s music? Sorry, but is this too square to complain about?
There is a good spectacle in the lobby of Nikolai, a flowery gay fellow of Tchaikovsky surrounding himself with young men and paintings of naked men, and we begin to recognize who the composer might be inside. Filming this in a film made in Russia today takes courage.
Once the marriage ends, though, about halfway through, Tchaikovsky is more or less out of the movie. The charismatic Mikhailova flops, as if acting in a new, paper-torn version of Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H. There is a strange scene where Nikolai has six men undress in front of Antonina and make her choose the person she wants to sleep with. (When the door simply closes, the implication is that she chose…all of them?) This has almost no historical or dramatic meaning, and is just part of the film’s most confusing part, where Antonina vehemently refuses to divorce Tchaikovsky, she succumbs to her descent – not only In Filth, Poverty but Mental Illness, which includes scenes from the movie we can’t be sure they actually happened. The question that haunts “Tchaikovsky’s wife” is one that has been around since the beginning: why does Antonina stick with Tchaikovsky and never leave her? It seems like a fair question, but not when you start to realize that it has no answer.
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