Writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov brings his intense sympathies to the unhappy figure of Antonina Miliukova, estranged wife of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, in a part once taken by Glenda Jackson in Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Music Lovers. Serebrennikov’s movie imagines Antonina as selfish, fanatical, naive, narcissistic and self-indulgent, not to say antisemitic, but also as the most wronged wife to a genius since Sophia Tolstoy, or, indeed, Constance Wilde.
As often in the past, this director’s film-making inhales or intuits the characteristics of its subject, and so it becomes almost oppressively hysterical and highly strung, like Antonina or Tchaikovsky himself. But the movie also becomes bizarre when it dramatises the reputation that Antonina acquired for sexual obsessiveness, with dozens of well-built naked men brought into the screen for balletic fantasy sequences. But the nymphomaniac reputation was given to Antonina, surely, by malicious well-connected men and intimates of Tchaikovsky who had a vested interest in undermining her.
