Cannes: ‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’ director Kirill Serebrennikov has objected to boycotts of Russian filmmakers but said he was relieved to be out of the country.
Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov has premiered three films in Cannes competition but walked the red carpet at the festival for the first time this week. In 2017, Serebrennikov was convicted by Russian authorities of an embezzlement scheme related to his theater group and prevented from leaving the country, a decision that angered human rights groups who claimed the allegations were fabricated. When the sentence was lifted earlier this year, Serebrennikov relocated to Germany while completing his new drama Tchaikovsky’s Wife just in time for the film to screen in Cannes.
Sitting on a festival balcony the day after its premiere, Serebrennikov said that although leaving Russia meant he had to leave his 90-year-old father, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine hastened the filmmaker’s decision, as soon as possible to move away law allows it. “If you live in war and you understand that you are in war – for a person like me it is very painful,” he said. “I had to say, ‘Fuck the war, I hate you, bye.’ One must not remain silent about this war.”
Related
Related
Still, Serebrennikov faces a complex situation at this year’s Cannes, where Russian delegates and journalists have been banned from pro-Putin publications, but Serebrennikov’s film was admitted to the competition because it was produced in Ukraine before the war.
Although it wasn’t funded by the government, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” – a somber investigation into the famous composer’s estranged wife – has been criticized for being funded by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Faced with UK government sanctions, Abramovich has tried to sell his Chelsea football club and European authorities have tried to confiscate his yachts (none of which have yet been spotted in Cannes). The project’s presence at the festival has raised questions about whether it violates the French government’s policy on the assets of individuals under European sanctions, although it was still unclear whether money linked to the production would come from Abramovich’s funds in France would be frozen.
During a press conference on “Tchaikovsky’s wife,” Serebrennikov defended Abramovich, calling him a “real patron of the arts” and calling for sanctions against him to be lifted. In his interview with IndieWire later that day, Serebrennikov said he wasn’t invested in the funding process for the film and didn’t even know how much it cost to make it. “I was just spending the money,” he said.
He disputed the position of many Ukrainians in the film industry that the mere presence of Russian cinema at the festival was tantamount to endorsing the war. “I can understand why they say that because everything is very painful for them,” he said. “Even listening to the Russian language is very painful for them because of the war. I understand and accept this. But we can’t stop language, we can’t stop music, we can’t stop staging, we can’t stop cinema. Can you explain to the French that right now they must avoid Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky and forget them all? Of course not, because it’s part of their consciousness. It’s not so easy to cut off Russian culture when it’s part of global culture.”
“Tchaikovsky’s Wife”
Serebrennikov’s film is itself a complex interrogation of Russian cultural history, as it explores an aspect of composer Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s biography that tends to be underestimated in the country. Actress Alyona Mikhaylova gives a tender and sad performance as Antonina Miliukova, who marries Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron) out of admiration for his work and then struggles to come to terms with his secretive sexuality. Eventually, she is driven into a state of insanity and nymphomania as the film invades her troubled mindset.
“Nobody knows about it,” said Serebrennikov, who based dialogue about the film on letters and interviews drawn from Tchaikovsky’s archives, most of which are in the United States. “Tchaikovsky became a great genius and now Russia is proud of him, but traditional power wants to hide the dark spots in his life – his sexuality and that he was a supporter of the monarchy. It wasn’t good for the Soviet era. His biography is almost destroyed by cutting out sentences from his letters and quotes. Everything is corrupted by people living in modern times. So I wanted to tell this true story.”
There is a growing political consciousness in Serebrennikov’s work. His 2018 Cannes entry Leto followed the controversies surrounding Leningrad rock musicians in the 1980s, while last year’s Petrov’s Flu satirizes the chaos of modern Russian life. Before the war, he was already producing his biggest project to date, Limonov, an English-language drama starring Ben Whishaw as a radical Russian poet who fled to the United States (The film will be screened to buyers at the Cannes market. )
“I try to make films about people who have their own relationship with the government,” Serebrennikov said. “They are rioting against the system. I don’t like the word dissident, but there is no other word for people who have started their own rebellion against the way things are.”
Serebrennikov said he only began to question the government itself after censorship laws were lifted during the perestroika era. “I started out as a victim of propaganda,” he said. “I was a kid growing up in the Soviet Union. New freedoms came later, and that period changed me with a lot of banned literature and films. It was like an explosion of everything. This punk reality shaped my consciousness.” Serebrennikov said that when Putin came to power over the past 20 years, his creativity became politicized. “Anything that’s going back to this new edition of the Soviet Union, all my art has been up against it and trying to kind of fight it and stop this shit,” he said.
He recalled watching Russian television reports targeting his theatrical productions as he began to tackle more controversial issues. “The question was, ‘Do we need theaters like this?'” he said. “As a poet [Joseph] Brodsky, who fled the Soviet Union in 1972, said, “I have a stylistic affinity with Soviet power.” It probably is. They hate what I’m doing and they think I’m destroying Russian culture.”
Still, Serebrennikov did not believe that all state-funded films should be censored. “If it’s not a propaganda film, no,” he said. “Propaganda is always about government ideas. True art films are about the vulnerability of every human being, the value of every life.”
As for his future, Serebrennikov said that if he even mentions the war, he is putting himself at risk. “Calling the war just a war is very dangerous now in Russia,” he said. But did he plan to go back? He gestured over his shoulder where a row of yachts were parked against the shimmering Mediterranean Sea. “I’m here,” he said. “I have no idea. Never say never.”
Tchaikovsky’s Wife premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
Registration: Stay up to date on the latest movie and TV news! Sign up for our email newsletter here.