“Tchaikovsky’s wife”, walking is an obsession

Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov’s film might oscillate between admiration and revulsion, for its penchant for excess, its willingness to break gendered corsets, its baroque style taken to extremes, and even a certain penchant for delirium, but what can never be debated is its the lucid ability to avoid indifference. IN Tchaikovsky’s wife the best of his style appears, a formal and narrative refinement that leaves the viewer with the impression of being present at a feast, a walk carried away by obsession. Obsession embodied in the figure of Antonina Miliukova (1848-1917), who was the wife of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) for barely a month, although her love obsession with the composer followed her throughout her life, culminating in a psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburg, the same city where her husband (he was by legal and religious requirement) died twenty-four years ago, tormented by his homosexuality at a time when such a condition was anathema.

Serebrenikov’s screenplay (exiled from Russia after his country invaded Ukraine and now an opponent of Putin) respects the chronology of events, adapts to the environment with exceptional attention to light and frame, but at the same time departs from conventional biographical work. In fact, Tchaikovsky is a secondary character despite haunting the entire plot, giving way to Russian actress Alyona Mikhailova, who achieves a superior register charged with emotional nuances.

The film is also the author’s view of his own country, his schizophrenic attitude towards culture, its neuroses and its repressions, of which Serebrennikov himself is a recent victim, when his ballet was withdrawn from the Bolshoi Theater Nureyev after calling it “homosexual propaganda”.

That everything is invented in the cinema can be questioned in the manner of a Russian director, without the need to reinvent the wheel and use talent and courage. It serves narrative cinema, yes, but daring (the story is extensive flashback); and, for example, the baroque and long opening sequence, before the title. A warning to movie dilettantes, of which there are a lot, by the way, although they… don’t know it.

“Tchaikovsky’s Wife”

Russia, France, Switzerland, 2023.

Director: Kirill Serebrennikov.

Performers: Alyona Mikhailova, Odin Lund Biron, Miron Fedorov, Nikita Elenev, Ekaterina Ermishina, Filipp Avdeev, Andrey Burkovskiy.

Drama.

143 minutes.