Tchaikovsky's Wife (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2022) (Patreon)

It feels like I've been seeing an inordinate amount of this guy's films lately, but hey, blame Thierry Fremaux. Tchaikovsky's Wife is Serebrennikov's latest, and is the final film I still had to catch up with from the 2022 Cannes competition lineup. When it debuted there, the reaction was mostly lukewarm, with a few critics observing that Serebrennikov, who made Leto and Petrov's Flu, had tamped down his rather aggressive style, turning in a well-appointed but middlebrow biopic. While it's certainly true that, aside from a couple of surreal digressions and one extended fantasy coda, Tchaikovsky's Wife is a comparatively conventional melodrama, I think this is probably a bit of subterfuge on the director's part. 

This wasn't missed by Russian critic Zinaida Pronchenko, whose review on the website Afisha Daily offers a pretty good example of the incoherence of current Russian politics. Pronchenko is presumably on the left, having spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine. But she bashes Tchaikovsky's Wife for purporting to be about feminism when it's really about "closeted homosexuals" frolicking nude and even -- gasp! -- occasionally appearing in drag. 

She also takes issue with the very premise of the film's project, since its main subject, Antonina Milyukova (Alena Mikhaylova), was "insane," given to ranting and self-destruction, eventually spending her final decades in a mental hospital. Serebrennikov, in other words, has provided us with an unreliable narrator, which only goes to show how little he actually cares about her plight, or the plight of women in general. Seen from that perspective, Tchaikovsky's Wife is about a high-profile artist whose queerness was suborned by a perverse demimonde and who, for purely selfish reasons, married an honest woman and turned her into a laughing stock. 

But maybe the problem here is that Serebrennikov is not operating within this either/or of oppression. As one becomes involved in the film's sometimes fanciful, often grim depiction of Imperial Russia in the 19th century, we begin to understand just how incoherent this social space actually is. We know intellectually that a ruling class existed who were very much at home under tsarist rule. But Tchaikovsky's Wife focuses on individuals who, for different reasons, have their lives warped by repressive ideologies. After all, Tchaikovsky (Odin Lund Biron) repaired to various mental hospitals over the course of his life, although his patrician family made sure these stays were brief and mostly concealed from the Russian press. Using Pronchenko's criteria, Pyotr Tchaikovsky is no more "reliable" or "sane" than Antonina.

Some things about Tchaikovsky's Wife are very plain. Antonina met Tchaikovsky at the salon of an acquaintance and was instantly smitten with him, and Serebrennikov has her remark several times about his "softness," "sensitivity," how he is "unlike other men." Tchaikovsky tried to explain that he had "never loved a woman," but his own available vocabulary for his gay desire was limited by social decorum as well as the historical period. However, seeing an opportunity to quash rumors and satisfy his family, he agreed to marry Antonina, provided they have a relationship "like a brother and sister." 

Antonina was convinced that she could make Pyotr love her by sheer force of will. In addition to believing in love at first sight, that Tchaikovsky was her "destiny," she and those around the composer also subscribed to the belief that, as a "genius," Tchaikovsky was unsuited to ordinary life. What Serebrennikov shows is just how much emotional circuitry must be re-routed, how many flawed ideas must be scaffolded upon each other, to manage that which cannot be said. Initially, Pyotr is kind to Antonina, offering to care for her and accepting the blame for the false marriage. But Milyukova, her middle-class pride wounded, understanding that there is a joke swirling around her that she alone doesn't get, chooses to exact revenge.

Serebrennikov seems to be working within a certain idiom, the historical biopic, as a way of flying below the radar. Yes, in many respects this is his most traditional film. But it's also his best. As opposed to the rampant nihilism of Petrov's Flu, where fascist ideas are bandied about with various innocents caught in the ideological crossfire, Tchaikovsky's Wife is about the intersection of incompatible life paths -- romantic love and innate genius -- that are really part of a proxy war. Women were allowed power only inasmuch as they could coax men to fall in love with them. Gay men were only permitted to exist so long as they kept their orientation out if sight. 

So to me, when Pronchenko complains that Serebrennikov is blithely "mixing the past and the present," she's really missing the point. Who is really "reviving the classics" of sexism and homophobia? Tchaikovsky's Wife displays the mutually assured destruction of marginalized people in a society that demands the neutralization of their desires. One could perhaps argue that in the 19th century, we knew no better. In 21st century Russia, Putin knows precisely what he's doing.