Director Kirill Serebrennikov, canonized by a certain Putin-unfriendly press as the rockstar among Russia's dissident artists, has an Israeli father and a Ukrainian mother, is gay, Buddhist, LGBTQ activist and a believer in climate alarmism and other stupidities his antennae pick up from the West. The days when, pestered by house arrest for embezzling government funds, he had to update his directing assignments in the West via rehearsal recordings delivered to him on USB sticks are fortunately over. Early last year he was free to leave the country after which he settled in Berlin. Since then he has been an outspoken critic of the conflict in Ukraine. The work he has delivered in the West in recent years has been unquestionably amazing: the Parsifal for Vienna (2021), Der Freischütz for Amsterdam (2022), two very unconventional productions, delivered fantastic performances. So expectations are high again for his Lohengrin, next season in Paris. A costume drama on celluloid like "Tchaikovsky's Wife" demonstrates the versatility of his talent.
His first feat after his release was the premiere of "Tchaikovsky's Wife" at Cannes. At the press conference of the festival, which had opened shortly before with a live speech by a cocaine-snorting clown, he was addressed mainly as a representative of his hostile country, with a still from The Truman Show in the background! It was the time when Russian artists had to prove they were dissident enough to deserve a Western audience. According to Agnieszka Holland, inviting a Russian film was a mistake. "Now is the time to stand up against Russian aggression in Ukraine," she said. She later demanded "a total ban on Russian cultural products in Europe." That Agnieszka Holland was not booed for this demonstrates how strongly anti-Russia propaganda weighed on cultural life last May. And still does, for that matter. Little does she know that the Ukrainian conflict, presented by the West as Russian aggression, is merely the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2202 of Feb. 17, 2015. Looking at a geopolitical hotbed of conflict without bias is not given to many.
"Russians know the price of freedom and the lack of it," Serebrennikov, who spent his youth in the Soviet Union, said upon his passage in Avignon in 2019. Exactly, and that is also why most Russians (75% according to Statista) support their president. After all, they understand very well why Washington is willing to spend $112 billion to let Ukraine wage this proxy war against Russia. For Washington's neoconservatives, eliminating Russia as a major world power is the sine qua non for a Second American Century. It's about bleeding Russia, no matter how many dead Ukrainians it takes.
Serebrennikov also had a hard time explaining that his film had been financed by the hunted oligarch Roman Abramovich, who had taken advantage of the corrupt privatization in 1990s Russia to become wealthy in the oil and gas business. Already in 2012, the director had approached the government but Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky refused to support the project because, according to him, Tchaikovsky was not a homosexual. At least that is what Serebrennikov claims, even though homosexuality is completely legal in Russia and Moscow seems to have bigger entertainment venues for gays than New York. "What is so disastrous about admitting that Tchaikovsky was homosexual?" the director asks quite rightly. After all, we find confirmation of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality in his letters.
“The central prohibition concerning Tchaikovsky’s life has been his homosexuality – the topic that has been barred from public discussion for almost a century . In the eyes of the authorities, it would have been unthinkable to accept the idea that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russia’s national treasure, was a homosexual. Therefore, he wasn’t!”, Marina Kostalovsky writes in "The Tchaikovsky Papers" focussing initally on the Soviet Union. In 1877, the year of Tchaikovsky's marriage, Article 995 of the Code placed homosexuals in the same category as those convicted of bestiality, and that led to imprisonment or Siberia. In practice, however, things did not work out that way because "everyone knew that rich and famous people, if they behaved well, were not harassed, and those who got close to scandal were invited to seek rest and distraction in Paris. Which they then did.", Nina Berberova writes in her Tchaikovsky biography.
When Peter Tchaikovsky receives a passionate letter from an 8-year-old younger girl, Antonina Milyukova, who declares her love for him and threatens to kill herself should he reject her, he finds in marriage a way out to put his life and his homosexual orientation into a socially acceptable mold. Moreover, the film suggests that he would have caved in to a dowry of 10,000 rubles. In Alexander Poznansky's biography, you won't find anything about this; in his letters to acquaintances, he describes Nina and her family as "very poor." That marriage will very soon cost him dearly. What moved the composer to enter into this predictably catastrophic alliance ? You will not find the answer in the Poznansky biography. "Life is dreadfully empty, dull and vulgar. I am seriously thinking of getting married," one letter fragment reads. It is of an appalling nonchalance from the mouth of a homosexual. "In any event, it would appear that Tchaikovsky failed to tell Antonina, the most important thing about himself -namely, that he preferred to have sex with young men, not with women. If so, he made a grave error, condemning both his life and hers to miseries that drove each to the edge of madness", Poznansky believes.
"Tchaikovsky's Wife" has turned out to be a sumptuous film with brilliant acting by Alyona Mikhailova (Nina) and Odin Biron (Peter) that makes both historical characters particularly believable, very different from Ken Russell's grotesque farce on the same subject in "The Music Lovers" (1971). Sometimes lit only by candlelight (DoP : Vladislav Opelyants) and inspired by the paintings of Ilya Repin, Serebrennikov paints Tsarist Russia in all its contrasts. The camera guides us from muddy streets where emaciated beggars roam, to elegant salons where French is spoken. Near churches, believers who seem to have escaped from a Dostoevsky novel perform rituals akin to witchcraft.
Funny details illustrate the seriousness of Peter's dilemma : the annoying fly that comes to sit on his forehead, the ring that pinches his finger and the candle that spontaneously extinguishes during the wedding ceremony. You do not see Tchaikovsky end up in bed with other men; in fact, he disappears from the picture entirely except for a touching photo shoot fantasized by Nina, together with her lawyer's three children. The unwillingness and inability to consummate marriage is what this film is about, and it is no surprise that the theater man in Serebrennikov concludes with a choreography of 5 naked men.
Daniil Orlov's music is very good, from the bare piano chords to the neo-romantic chamber music; it's all used extremely efficiently and it's a real bonus. The music of Tchaikovsky is deliberately avoided. Only once is the theme of Tatyana from Yevgeny Onegin casually touched upon during the wedding, and an excerpt from Francesca da Rimini is heard during an opera visit.
"Tchaikovsky's Wife" places the subject in a feminist frame of mind. It focuses entirely on Nina, at a time when "wives were but a name on their husband's passport" and follows her struggle to remain Tchaikovsky's wife despite intense pressure to accept divorce. With this vivid portrait of a distraught mistress abused by everyone, including the object of her blind passion, Serebrennikov has given Tchaikovsky's wife a name. It is a pathological obsession that drives her but one that she has in common with all the heroines in opera, who do not appear in real life but exist only as "as if"-beings by the grace of the utopias dreamed up by opera librettists. The difference is : Antonina Milyukova really existed. It is almost a monument that Serebrennikov lays at her feet.