Though technically exacting and historically authoritative from a visual, atmospheric, production-design perspective, Kirill Serebrennikov‘s Tchaikovsky’s Wife is a perfectly miserable film to sit through.
It’s the story of Antonina Miliukova, a mentally unstable obsessive who persuaded the closeted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to marry her (he needed a beard) in 1877 Russia.
For 16 years or until the composer’s death from cholera in 1893, Antonina refused to understand or accommodate herself to the fact that Pyotr was gay. Tchaikovsky realized very quickly that he’d made a terrible mistake. The marriage was almost nothing but misery for the poor guy.
Born in 1848, the headstrong Antonina married Tchaikovsky at age 28 — well past the appropriate age in late 19th Century Russia. She was 45 when he passed, and spent her last 20 years in an insane asylum. She died in 1917.
In short, the narrative of Tchaikovsky’s Wife has nowhere to go but down, and boy, does it ever! The viewer is condemned to endure Antonina’s delusion and denial for two hours. It feels airless and repetitive and de-oxygenated and terminal.
The muddy, murky, candle-kit cinematography made me feel like I was slowly going blind. I certainly felt as if I was dying of boredom, and it left me feeling afflicted with a form of spiritual typhoid fever.
I began to hate Tchaikovsky’s Wife almost immediately. Russians lived in a dungeon in the 1870s and 1880s…what a hellish environment. I couldn’t stand it, and was especially appalled by Serebrennikov’s refusal to let a little light into the situation by allowing us to revel in Tchaikovsky’s music. Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’70) is not without issues, but it’s a much more arresting film than Tchaikovsky’s Wife.
For what it’s worth, Alyona Mikhailova, 26, delivers a sad, believable performance as Miliukova. As Tchaikovsky, Odi Biron is also fine or, you know, as good as the script permits.
HE agrees 110% with Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety pan.