The last times the films of Russian Kirill Serebrennikov competed at Cannes, Leto in 2018 and Petrov fever in 2021, empty chairs replaced it. Under house arrest in Moscow, this great defender of rights and freedoms, active in the LGBTQ community, was chomping at the bit. Left to live in Berlin after the invasion of Ukraine, under the blessing of the Kremlin, too happy, on reflection, to get rid of it, the famous dissident is a free man. He was able to launch “No to war! after the screening of his film Tchaikovsky’s Wife, before saluting the culture capable of stopping the bombs: “It will come to this end and there will be peace. »
His presence on the Croisette serves as a symbol, shortly after the President of Ukraine made a video appearance at the opening of the Cannes ball. The filmmaker, also a director, will open the Avignon Festival this summer with his version of Anton Chekhov’s Black Monk. He is welcomed with open arms in the west, his talent recognized for many years, already a family favourite.
Stylistic mastery and social responsibility
A fine observer of Russian society, with often baroque and subversive works, Serebrennikov today ventures elsewhere in his form. Tchaikovsky’s wife is woven with references to the cinema of Tarkovsky and Sokurov, a classic film of very high quality Russian formal perfectionism. Grabbing a subject already covered by Ken Russel in The Pathetic Symphony in 1971, he tackled the impossible marriage in 1877 of the composer of Swan Lake, homosexual and misogynistic, with a woman madly in love, chosen to stifle the rumors on his account. But this time the filmmaker has taken on the point of view (freely adapted) of the female musician Antonina Milioukova, a tragic figure who ends up in an insane asylum, a bit like Camille Claudel. Tchaikovsky had taken the poor creature in horror, who lived far from his idol while refusing a divorce, but inspired his opera Eugene Onegin.
This film is a portrait of female alienation in 19th century Russia, more than a biography of the great composer. Above all, a magnificent allegory of supreme power that kills the sensitivity of others to establish its mastery. And these exceptional sequence shots, these natural lightings in the fog, these interiors by candlelight are of a sublime beauty, recalling The Age of Innocence of Scorsese, located at the same time.
Actress Aliona Mikhaïlova brings the film to a note of obsessive, almost musical madness when Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron) sees himself reduced to a silhouette of exasperated harshness. The fauna of the master’s friends, sometimes in a dreamlike and surreal mode, leads the film here and there to the side of farce without putting aside the terrible tragedy. This film should land on the charts, for its stylistic mastery and for its hidden and explosive social impact.
In competition, we also saw yesterday the film The Eight Mountains, directed by Flemings Félix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch but shot in Italy in the local language. And this story of friendship between two men linked by childhood memories in the Alps, is above all a tribute to the mountains filmed with love like the heroines of the story, where human emotion can hardly pierce the ‘screen.
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.