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The 2022 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or competition begins with Kirill Serebrennikov‘s Tchaikovsky’s Wife — his fourth consecutive feature to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival which makes it back to back years with Petrov’s Flu premiering in 2021. The Student (2016) was an Un Certain Regard selection and 2018’s Leto was his first time in competition.

Tchaikovsky’s Wife essentially tells the story of Antonina Miliukova’s not too healthy union with the great Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Odin Lund Biron). It’s a heightened drama and historical hypothesis that sees Miliukova (a truly committed performance by actress Alyona Mikhailova) spiral out of control offering self-adulation and exaggeratedly late accountability.…...

With Ken Russell’s madly over-the-top The Music Lovers reassuringly tucked in dusty attic corners after 52 years, a fresh and notably inspired take on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s fraught marriage arrives in the churningly emotional and visually rich Tchaikovsky’s Wife.

Director Kirill Serebrennikov, whose most recent films were Leto and Petrov’s Flu, is currently in exile from his homeland following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Additional ill will at home surrounding the prominent theater and opera director’s new work stems from its exploration of the composer’s gay leanings, an officially taboo subject locally but one that will stir interest among significant audiences internationally.

By all accounts, Tchaikovsky’s intimate life was fraught, complicated and likely rooted in a need to at least appear to adhere to convention. Almost at once, the film pulls you into to swirl of musically driven movement, emotional instability and highly focused desire...

Back when art-house movies played full-time in art houses, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” at least on paper, might have seemed a film of middlebrow commercial hooks — the sort of movie that would have slipped into the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York and played there comfortably for a month or so. The first hook, of course, is Tchaikovsky himself, the Russian composer who created works of such timeless and popular beauty that he is always in danger, in an odd way, of being underrated, like the Spielberg of longhairs. Tchaikovsky’s short-lived marriage, to Antonina Miliukova, was both a disaster and a semi-scandal, but the time now feels ripe for a rediscovery of this tragic episode, which hinged on Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and the fact that he agreed to marry as a desperate closeted strategic ploy. That the late 19th century was a time when even an artist of his magnitude could not live openly,...