Writer-director Ken Russell was a classical music buff. He filmed portions of operas, directed operas on stage, and made a series of films about the lives of composers, including Elgar, Mahler and Liszt. This particular film is part of that series and offers his take on Tchaikovsky, as played by Richard Chamberlain, and now available on Blu-Ray.
It would be a disservice to both Russell and Tchaikovsky to call this a biopic, because it is not intended to be a historically accurate recitation of verified facts. It is rather Russell’s speculation about how an elderly Tchaikovsky might have looked back on his life if he were experiencing feverish dreams while listening to his own music. Events and characters are distorted and exaggerated in the way we tend to do when we recall distant memories, magnifying the significance of those things which had the greatest emotional impact on us, making the merely unpleasant seem grotesque and repulsive, and the pleasant seem glittering.
As the story is told here, Tchaikovsky’s psyche is ruled by his inability to reconcile his homosexuality with the “decency” required of him by 19th century Russian society. He marries an impoverished, lusty, uneducated woman who adores him passionately, thus dooming both of them to great unhappiness and frustration.
In order to “pitch” the commercial viability of a film about classical music, Russell described the film to his backers as “the story of a homosexual married to a nymphomaniac,” and the auteur did not fail to deliver on the lurid possibilities of that premise. Don’t expect this film to be a measured, thoughtful treatment of the great composer. It is at times surreal, over-the-top, farcical, and debauched. Its pacing is manic, bordering on hysterical. Don’t expect to see the kind of languorous, one-camera tracking shots that were popular in other 1970-era films about serious topics. Ken Russell was not trying to make stately films in the manner of Bergman, Kubrick or Tarkovsky. He was more like Fellini on speed. We are used to seeing films that consist of hundreds of rapid-fire cuts, but Russell was a pioneer of this technique in 1970, to a point where it seemed that he packed far more scenes and images into his films than any other director of his time. Even when he sticks to a scene from start to finish without cutting back-and-forth to some other times or places, Russell may incorporate dozens of different camera angles into his presentation, using none of them for more than a few seconds. When my ex-wife and I saw Russell’s “The Devils” in 1971, after having seen “The Music Lovers” a few months earlier, she opined that Russell could have remade the leisurely-paced “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a one-minute commercial. She wasn’t exaggerating by that much.
Do I think that Ken Russell did a good job on this film? Absolutely. Russell may or may not be your kind of guy, but the man had talent. I don’t really like the film, but I have to give the devil his due.
First of all, the music is tremendous. Andre Previn directed the London Symphony Orchestra in creating a marvelous all-Tchaikovsky score for this film. By the way, Richard Chamberlain’s face and hands were both in the frame when he played the piano in this role, and some of the music required complicated keyboarding. We are actually hearing a professional pianist, Rafael Orozco, but Chamberlain had to learn the fingering. I don’t play the piano, so I’m not the guy to make the call, but I found Chamberlain quite convincing.
The real success of the film is not the music itself because film is, after all, a visual medium. What impresses me is that the visuals provide a perfect accompaniment to Tchaikovsky’s compositions, always seeming to suit the music, irrespective of whether the portrayed actions are based on reality. The images are tender, pathetic, joyful, or frenetic when the music calls for it. In creating the concept, the author-director first tried to condense Tchaikovsky’s life into its essence, as the composer himself might have encapsulated it in a dream state. Russell then set the most memorable images from that dream-life to the great genius’s music, attempting to show how certain events and/or moods in Tchaikovsky’s life might have corresponded to or have inspired his work. If you take the film on its own terms, accepting Russell’s sense of humor as well as his historical distortions, you may find the film to be an intense experience and an inspired, if occasionally trashy, piece of art.
Just don’t take any of it too seriously, and don’t expect it to be consistently uplifting. Art is not always pretty, and art is not life. Sometimes they’re not even that similar.
And that can be a good thing.
This completes the release of all of Glenda Jackson’s nude scenes in HD.
Glenda rose from an impoverished working-class background to become one of the most respected actresses in the English-speaking world, and then to win a seat in Parliament.
She was part of the first generation of distinguished actresses who took roles that demanded substantial nudity. She told a reporter that she was the first actress in London to go on stage completely nude. This happened in The Theater of Cruelty, an experimental project of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In films, Julie Christie was the real nudity trailblazer among the acclaimed actresses of that generation, having done a nude scene as early as 1965, and Vanessa Redgrave took second place in 1966, but it was really Glenda Jackson and Helen Mirren who followed that path so boldly in the late 60s and early 70s that they shattered all the taboos. Mirren, of course, kept at it for decades, while Jackson’s nude career was compressed into just seven years, 1968-1975, as seen below.
Glenda started to act again in 2015. The following year, she made her return to the Old Vic at age 80, after a 25-year absence, as Shakespeare’s King Lear, a gender-bending turn that earned her nearly universal praise.
1968 – Negatives
1969 – Women in Love
1970 – Glenda posed for some see-through pictures for Mary Ellen Mark.
1971 – Sunday Bloody Sunday
1971 – The Music Lovers
1975 – The Romantic Englishwoman
