Cannes Review: Kirill Serebrennikov’s ‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’

Todd McCarthy
·4 min read
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With Ken Russell’s madly over-the-top The Music Lovers reassuringly tucked in dusty attic corners after 52 years, a fresh and notably inspired take on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s fraught marriage arrives in the churningly emotional and visually rich Tchaikovsky’s Wife.

Director Kirill Serebrennikov, whose most recent films were Leto and Petrov’s Flu, is currently in exile from his homeland following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Additional ill will at home surrounding the prominent theater and opera director’s new work stems from its exploration of the composer’s gay leanings, an officially taboo subject locally but one that will stir interest among significant audiences internationally.

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By all accounts, Tchaikovsky’s intimate life was fraught, complicated and likely rooted in a need to at least appear to adhere to convention. Almost at once, the film pulls you into to swirl of musically driven movement, emotional instability and highly focused desire — creative inspiration on the composer’s part and an almost smothering and single-minded devotion on the part of Nina Miliukora, whose single obsession in life is to become his wife.

Swirling, long-take camera moves escort you through innumerable rooms, into high society as well as crowded streets, and otherwise provide an enveloping visit to a place and time ruled by traditional societal expectations. And no one’s intentions are more focused than Nina’s, whose looks and brains are unexceptional but whose will proves stronger than anyone else’s.

Serebrennikov isn’t just interested in rich decor and extravagant camera moves for their own sake, as he succeeds through scenic and as well as behavioral nuances in revealing a society built upon reliably rigid rules and protocols to keep people in their respective places. Not that he needed to in order to tell this story, but the director finds good reasons to occasionally step out of the immediate upper-class milieu to provide glimpses of the world below that, just a few decades later, would break apart entirely.

The film immerses you in a world both distant and long dead, and it welcomes you into a past that sparks a significant amount of curiosity about its components, both official and behavioral. Tchaikovsky provides a very useful vantage point from which to examine the mores of his era; he both benefited from his society’s fixation on music and the arts and suffered from its exceptionally rigid set of
expectations. As Serebrennikov presents things, even the slightest deviation from prescribed norms and expectations provided cause for considerable concern.

In any event, it’s Nina’s resolute will to marry her less-convinced partner that carries the day, but any conviction in their union doesn’t even last that long. For her, the marriage means everything, while for him, it’s at best a public display of convention that will hopefully satisfy his family and put an end to certain suspicions. In the event, neither desire is remotely satisfied; the atmosphere they live in becomes immediately toxic and the idea of a life together would seem to be hell itself.

The film excels at observing the various degrees of connubial misery, and things only get worse as time goes on. For her part, Nina is unwilling to consider any separation but, eventually, it becomes a version of “geniuses are permitted anything.” In this vein, the homestretch is also notable for some bizarre scenes involving numerous buff and very naked men.

What the film might do best is to subtly trace the various degrees of self-deception in people who are driven as hard as these two are — she to keep her man at whatever cost, he to pursue his muse while laboring to maintain a pose of normalcy. Both prove impossible, and the cost of discovering this is high for both of them.

As the inspired composer who feels compelled to keep his complicated emotions on a tight leash, Odin Lund Biron calibrates the composer’s emotional temperature with impeccable exactitude, while Alyona Mikhailova excels as a woman whose single-focused outlook on life and her prospects is both impressive and scary. Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography sweeps, darts and scurries around to be just where he needs to be at all the right moments.

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