Writer-director Ken Russell is a classical music buff.
He has filmed portions of operas, has 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.
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. In 2011 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.
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.
