ci took three films in competition because the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov could parade, as it should, on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival. Last May the author of Summer (Leto)2018 film about the Leningrad rock scene in the 80s, and Petrov’s Flu (2021)a satire on the chaos facing contemporary Russia, was able to accompany Zena TchaikovskyMeaning what The wife of Tchaikovsky at the French festival. And even if being present “to defend one’s work” was a relief and “very moving” after the conviction for embezzlement by the Russian judiciary in 2017 which forced him under house arrest for two years, Cannes is not it was a walk for him.
Kirill Serebrennikov (Photo by Laurent KOFFEL)
And not only because leaving Russia, with no hope of returning there in the short term, meant abandoning his ninety-year-old father for him, but also because the controversy that the presence of a Russian film in the main competition has aroused.
On one side the Ukrainian filmmakers’ association demanded a total ban on all Russian works (the festival decided to admit the film because it was produced before the start of the conflict), on the other hand, Serebrennikov was contested (vividly in a press conference, by a Georgian journalist) with the fact that the film was partly financed by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, close to Vladimir Putin.
There is a moment of The wife of Tchaikovsky which, together with Summer (Leto), it will come presented at Seeyousound, film and music festival to be held in Turin from February 24th to March 2nd (seeyousound.org), which says a lot about the author’s vision: from his deathbed, the composer’s corpse rises, resurrected, for the time necessary to scream his hatred towards his wife, “the biggest mistake committed in life”.
Alyona Mikhaylova and Odin Biron, spouses Tchaikovsky.
“Pëtr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was homosexual and he was a tsarist,” Serebrennikov explains to I woman. “During the Soviet period his biography was purified, sweetened, his letters and quotations censored.” Precisely from those letters and diaries the author started to weave dialogues that returned, “almost like in a documentary” the truth of that conjugal union, made up of the obsession of a woman who, according to some biographers, had already maintained correspondence with other celebrities of the time, and the cynicism of a genius. She would always refuse to admit evidence of a wrong match and flatly reject any offer of separation, he had realized too late that a marriage of convenience from a safety net it had become a death trap.
The tale of two egos
The desire to tell this story was not born today for her. What finally allowed you to make the film?
I wanted to tell about Tchaikovsky and his wife Antonina Miliukova (played by actress Alyona Mikhaylova, musician is Odin Biron, ed) years ago, but I didn’t make it: finding money for a film about him in Russia would have meant making a propaganda film. They clearly told me: “We want a straight Tchaikovsky, not your gay antics”. I refused: I didn’t care about the sex life of the most famous Russian composer, but I want to be free. Tchaikovsky’s life has been complicated, I wouldn’t say gay sums up who he was, and certainly it’s not our job to compromise on his sexuality. What I wanted to tell is the story of two egos, two people who have not been able to listen to each other and that they didn’t understand each other. It started out as a film about Tchaikovsky, but turned into something else: Antonina is a figure of whom very little is known in Russiaremained in the shadows, yet Tchaikovsky was married to her until his death.
Odin Biron, Kirill Serebrennikov and Alena Mikhailova in Cannes. (Photo by Laurent KOFFEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Why is Tchaikovsky so controversial in Russia?
Being gay in Russia is a trauma, there are anti-gay laws which punish what is called “gay propaganda”, homosexuality is associated with pedophilia, many people in Russia suffer because they have been relegated to the darkest corners of society. It didn’t start with Putin, but under Putin it was made official. With perestroika, the Soviet liberticidal laws had been cancelled, Putin restored them.
Were you also interested in talking about the relationship that can develop between an ordinary person who degrades to describe himself as an “insect” and the genius?
I wanted to use Antonina’s lens, put the camera inside her consciousness, inside her brain. Also to say something about the condition of women in Russian society, which is a very virile universe, where many think that women have no rights, that their place is in the kitchen, that they have to take care of the children and nothing else.
The impossible return
Has this film made the relationship with the motherland more complicated?
Now I’m in Europe, I work here. Theaters call me (Black Monkfrom a short story by Chekhov, directed by him, opened the last Avignon festival, for the Amsterdam Opera Ballet he staged Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber, with music by Tom Waits and the University of Nanterre last October awarded him an honorary degree, ed) and then I have to finish the film on Limonov (the shooting of Limonov, the Ballad of Eddiebased on the best-seller by Emmanuelle Carrere and starring Ben Whishaw, were interrupted by the outbreak of war and then resumed in Europe, the film is now in post-production, ed).
Are you planning on returning to Russia?
Not for now…
The rehearsals of its actors are of rare intensity. And Antonina Miliukova’s plunge into madness is heartbreaking. How did you work with the two protagonists of the film?
First of all I asked to film in chronological order which is against all rules, usually we work according to the sets and the actors’ commitments. I insisted to me it was essential that the actors feel part of the story and the evolution of the characters they embodied. I didn’t want them to pretend, I wanted them to “be”. And Alyona is able to get into character with incredible intensity. I saw her progressively become Antonina. She began by putting on her shoes to find her right walk, then her clothes to appropriate her posture, until she became her, with her obsessions and her craziness.
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