Tchaikovsky’s Wife – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Tchaikovsky’s Wife – first-look review

19 May 2022

Words by Mark Asch

A young girl with dark hair wearing a black coat, standing by a window and looking contemplative.
A young girl with dark hair wearing a black coat, standing by a window and looking contemplative.
Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov focus­es on the rela­tion­ship between one of Russia’s great­est com­posers and his ador­ing, but unloved, partner.

Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov is back in Cannes. The dis­si­dent Russ­ian film­mak­er was under house arrest in 2018, when his Leto played in com­pe­ti­tion, the sub­ject of a polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed embez­zle­ment tri­al – atten­dees from that year recall a woman wear­ing a home­made Free Sere­bren­nikov” t‑shirt around the Croisette – and was still stuck in Rus­sia when pro­mot­ing last year’s Petrov’s Flu, the pro­duc­tion of he jug­gled with his court dates. 

As recent­ly as mid-March, dur­ing the ear­ly days of Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine, he bowed out of a sched­uled livestream Q&A at New York’s Muse­um of the Mov­ing Image for fear of reprisals. Weeks lat­er, his trav­el ban lift­ed, he arrived in Ger­many, where he now plans to live, and was on hand in Cannes for the world pre­mière of Tchaikovsky’s Wife, to soak up a lengthy and deserved ova­tion in the same audi­to­ri­um that aired a video mes­sage from Volodymyr Zelen­sky at last night’s open­ing ceremonies.

The first Palme d’Or con­tender to pre­mière at this year’s fes­ti­val con­cerns a sub­ject close to Serebrennikov’s heart – the strug­gles and com­pro­mis­es of a Russ­ian artist – but its auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal and polit­i­cal res­o­nances are far more com­pli­cat­ed than any one-to-one correspondences.

Petrov’s Flu closed with a lengthy, tech­ni­cal­ly dif­fi­cult long take fol­low­ing the per­am­bu­la­tions of a res­ur­rect­ed corpse; ear­ly in Tchaikovsky’s Wife, a sim­i­lar­ly com­plex sin­gle-take fol­lows Anton­i­na Mil­iuko­va (Ale­na Mikhailo­va) through the throngs of mourn­ers at her husband’s funer­al, up a flight of stairs and into the room where the body of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Odin Lund Biron) rests in an open cas­ket – but rests” is the wrong word, as the com­pos­er sits up and bit­ter­ly remon­strates with her wid­ow, scoff­ing at the mes­sage on her wreath: From his wife, who wor­shipped him.” 

The film then jumps back 20 years to the 1870s, and their first meet­ing. The smit­ten Anton­i­na pur­sues the great man avid­ly, devout­ly, with let­ters and prayers, and despite his reluc­tance, he pro­pos­es mar­riage, in lan­guage that sug­gests a catch: Tchaikovsky was gay, and Anton­i­na his beard. 

The first half of the film is in a more con­ven­tion­al Europ­ud­ding biopic vein, with expen­sive-look­ing pro­duc­tion design heavy on the blacks, nat­ur­al light­ing sources giv­ing every­thing a state­ly pati­na, and mut­ed pac­ing that, at times, muf­fles or even dead­ens the dra­ma. Through the nego­ti­a­tions of their rela­tion­ship, with Anton­i­na pro­claim­ing her undy­ing devo­tion and desire to sup­port him, and the genius keep­ing her at arm’s length, Sere­bren­nikov explores how repres­sion and deceit warp careers and rela­tion­ships, and offers an implic­it­ly self-crit­i­cal look at the self­ish­ness of a pri­vate artis­tic pas­sion, sug­gest­ing that every rela­tion­ship between artist and help­meet is, at least par­tial­ly, a mar­riage of convenience. 

There are hints, though, of some­thing alto­geth­er wooli­er, moments of obscure sym­bol­ism – a black fly that lands on Tchaikovsky’s fore­head, a spool of black thread that Anton­i­na spins – that point the way towards the much more sub­jec­tive, vir­tu­oso expe­ri­ence that Tchaikovsky’s Wife becomes after Tchaikovsky, through inter­me­di­aries, nego­ti­ates a sep­a­ra­tion with Anton­i­na, who sinks deep­er into obses­sion and des­per­a­tion. She refus­es a divorce, since she and her hus­band are bond­ed togeth­er by god. (For fans of movies in which the title char­ac­ter declares who they are, Tchaikovsky’s Wife is unmiss­able.)

Ale­na Mikhailo­va exudes unnerv­ing con­vic­tion in a role sim­i­lar to the title char­ac­ter in anoth­er real-life 19th-cen­tu­ry sto­ry of roman­tic obses­sion, Adèle Hugo, played by the young Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut’s Sto­ry of Adele H. She sub­sists on pay­ments from her estranged hus­band, and ends up as the top in her own rela­tion­ship of one-way depen­dence and abjec­tion, with her lawyer, with whom she deigns to have desul­to­ry sex (she gives the babies up to an orphan­age and names the son after her hus­band, not his father). 

Sere­bren­nikov match­es Antonina’s delu­sions with Kustir­i­can trav­el­ing long takes that, like those in Petrov’s Flu, shift with­out a cut between dis­tinct eras in time and reg­is­ters of real­i­ty. In one such shot, Anton­i­na sends her hus­band off to St Peters­burg by train, goes to sit in the sta­tion café, and then, with­in the film-space of the same shot, emerges to greet him upon his return days lat­er (he’s not on the train). 

By film’s end, as the sound­track trav­els for­ward from the 19th cen­tu­ry to the 21st, and Serebrennikov’s cam­era fol­lows Anton­i­na into the depths of unre­quit­ed love, Tchaikovsky’s Wife has become a vision­ary evo­ca­tion of the heart­break and sick­ness of a woman in love with a Russ­ian icon who doesn’t love her back.

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