Kirill Serebrennikov, director of Tchaikovsky’s Wife, did he realize that his two heroes, if not really good and bad, were also stupid?
The story is simple and known to everyone: Tchaikovsky (here played by the Russian-speaking American actor Odin Biron) does not like women. Bad luck, it’s one of his students who falls madly in love with him. She even manages to convince the composer to marry her. Which seems to accept this union to seize the dowry of the young and very pretty Antonia Milioukava (played by Aliona Mikhaïlova). However, in real life, I inquired, Antonia was not so young (29 years old) and even less innocent than she appears in the film. The love letters she addressed to him, she sent them to all that the good society of St. Petersburg counted, wealthy or famous celibates. And it is not this film that teaches us, but Wikipedia.
Georgian dissident, the director believes he can breathe sincerity into the relationship between the spouses. But the story, the real one, rebels. So he insists, asks his actress to add to the amorous frenzy. She does tons of it, without managing to be credible. Nothing is more discouraging than the effort in love, even in the cinema. From then on, the love story he wanted to film skates on a lake of indecipherable signs. Kirill Serebrennikov, outspoken gay, misses the opportunity to give free rein to his Edenic fantasies, as Pasolini, Visconti, Fellini, Fassbinder and a few others had done before him, the virtuosity of their anachronisms prevented the fictional edifice from becoming collapse. Not here. We stay in the room because it’s beautiful work, despite everything, the sets, the lights, and especially the face of Aliona Mikhaïlova about whom we wonder all the same by what spell her painful grimaces leave us unmoved, everything as she herself will remain insensitive to this skewer of gogo boys offered to her in compensation for her impotent and heterophobic husband; we go from lake of signs At Quagmire of its vile gentlemen.
Precision by way of explanation. Kirill Serebrennikov wrote his screenplay in 2018, when he was under house arrest by Vladimir Putin who had stuck on his back an accusation of embezzlement, like the bloated Kremlin horn in the balance every time he wants to get rid of a dissident or an oligarch who is a little too greedy.
Okay, so I wonder if the imprisoned screenwriter wouldn’t have tried to create an allegory around Russia’s relations with Ukraine. Thus, under the pretext of freeing the composer from his perverse inclinations, Antonia Milioukava, like a Wagnerian Putinette, righter of Western wrongs, would have invaded Tchaikovsky’s life by promising him the denazification of Kiev and the eradication of pederastic vice. This at the cost of massive destruction of the morale of the composer. The way she has of bombarding poor Tchaikovsky with legal proceedings for an infringement of human rights to prefer men. He will also attempt to commit suicide, which is not specified in the film, it’s a shame and a bit unfair. Especially since during this time, the invasive wife, after refusing the divorce, gives birth to three children outside of this unconsummated marriage. Three children she sends, barely born, to the orphanage where they will not survive.
And she complains, the devil, of the ingratitude of her husband who refuses to play this comedy of the fusional couple! I can’t help diagnosing this woman with Putin’s syndrome, who is astonished and complains about the resistance of the Ukrainians who refuse to be part of the Russian empire. If Kirill Serebrennikov wanted this allegory, his film is successful.