Back on the Croisette, the Russian filmmaker presents in competition there his new feature film, freely inspired by the life of the composer’s wife.
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Exchanged for a few months barely from the open -air jail that becomes Russia, where he was prosecuted by justice and assigned to house since 2017, filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, 52, returns to Cannes by the Grande Porte de The competition, after having been successively praised for Leto (2018) and Petrov fever (2021). Man of theater (he is also on the way to Avignon, where he will mount in July the black monk, by Anton Tchekhov) and feverish director, incessantly on the breach, he is with Andreï Zviaguintsev a major representative of contemporary Russian cinema and A worthy epigone of his great humanist tradition, both lyrical and enraged.
Obviously interested in the figure of the composer Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski (1840-1893), around which he maintained a project that never succeeds, he reaches the goal today by resorting to a matrimonial hook, focusing on his remarks on Antonina Milioukova (1848-1917), the musician’s wife, and, through her, on the disastrous marriage that unites, before quickly disuniting, this couple.
Despite his incipit, who evokes the sad fate made to women in XIX Russia e century, we will allow ourselves to think that the woman of Tchaikovski is not more a feminist feminist advocacy than a music lover. Beyond the question of its historical-biographical accuracy, on which the film critic will not venture to issue an opinion, it will be said essentially that this film is one of the most powerful allegories ever made on the immemorial alienation of the people Russian to a power that never thought of something else than to enslave.
Tchaikovski’s wife opens with the composer’s funeral, which, when his wife appears, gets up from the mortuary layer to tell her how much he hates her. The film then goes back in time to introduce us to the strangest relationship that one can imagine, under the auspices poisoned with sacrifice, cruelty and maceration. The staging, between realism and dreamlike, distills, in heady sequences, this metal atmosphere, precipitated with filmed mental suffering as from the interior of a jar. We will not get out.
existential vertigo
Young girl of a modest background whose mother is a formidable shrew who prefers Mendelssohn (the specialists will say if she has better her daughter), Antonina Milioukova (Alona Mikhailova) Stays from Tchaikovski (Odin Biron) during of a meeting in a worldly living room. She enrolled in the Conservatoire to approach him, quickly throws herself at her head, declares an absolute love flame, claims to be the woman of her life or nothing.
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