Barely a few hours after the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saw the huge screen of the great Lumière Theater begging for a new Chaplin capable of pointing the cinema’s gun at Vladimir Putin, the new film of the Russian exile Kiril Serébrennikov, The Wife of Tchaikovsky, opened the official part of the competition with a taboo subject in his country, homosexuality, one of its national glories. In his relentless fight against LGBT groups, even Putin himself has publicly denied that the composer of “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker,” as told in this tough film, was gay.
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For the third time in his career, Serébrennikov has competed for the Palme d’Or, in 2018 with the melancholic Leto, about a rock band in Leningrad in the 1980s, and a year ago with Petrov’s Flu, a feverish journey through a cartoonist from comics that he wrote in his delusions and hallucinations. Both times Serébrennikov could not come to Cannes because of house arrest, but now, already in exile, he presents his new and tortuous film here. Tchaikovsky’s Wife is a dark film about a deranged character, Antonina Miliukova, the woman the musician married when she was 16 and he was 25. Students and teachers never contracted a marriage intended to silence rumors about the composer’s sex life. However, Miliukova, obsessed with her status and her husband, never agreed to a divorce. Though Serebrennikov’s film is difficult to begin with, its immersion in an opaque and oppressive sex well is total.
Always in the hands of actress Alyona Mikhailova, who, with her innocent and wide-eyed expression, portrays an unfortunate and terrifying figure, Serébrennikov constructs a descent into hell through orchestrated sequences, such as a mourning dance, that place the viewer in magnetic levitation in which the Bodies appear to wander aimlessly through time. There are moments of desperate sexuality that portray the wife as a dim light, a naïve victim of social hypocrisy ready to burn herself for her stubborn desires. Serébrennikov succeed in magnificent scenes such as those of the gay scenes of the time or the visit to the composer’s sister, but also others that are less successful, such as the invented final choreography. The tragic figure of Antonina Miliukova sums up the collateral damage of a persecuted and oppressed homosexuality, still doomed to the catacombs of her country nearly a century and a half after that hellish marriage.
Still from the movie The Eight Mountains.
The other film that opened the official competition was the beautiful, if unfortunately not round, “The Eight Mountains” by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, based on the book of the same name by Paolo Cognetti. It is a story of brotherly love through time, with the mountains of northern Italy as a haven and horizon. Portrayed as adults by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, the film begins in the 1980s. But what initially seems like a story about two boys who are confronted with the contrast between town and country develops into an exciting story about an orphanage and male friendship. The Eight Mountains tells of how many people relate to stillness and the mountains, how some find freedom in a landscape and in their misanthropy. Men with few words who, after a long walk through the mountains, can understand everything without opening their mouths. The first-person film by Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch has two problems. One is the voiceover that sometimes misuses the words of Paolo Cognetti and his novel, and the other is an unspeakable soundtrack that jumps from bad song to bad song until it annoys the viewer with its useless underlining and bad taste . .
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