Before my recent essays on Mommie Dearest and Behind the Candelabra got me thinking about the form and function of the biographical movie as a genre, I don’t know that I’d ever given much thought as to what I personally look
for in a biopic.
While I know I’m comfortable relinquishing a certain
level of historical fidelity for the sake of drama and a filmmaker’s vision
(for example, I don’t mind the glamorization and historical inaccuracies in
1967’s Bonnie & Clyde); I do find I lose patience
with complete whitewash jobs that alter historical fact in an effort to sanitize the subject and adhere to a
standardized Hollywood biofilm format (the 1946 Cole Porter biopic Night & Day turned the life of the homosexual composer into just another conventional heterosexual love story).
I guess when I’m really out to learn something about the
life of a historical figure, I tend to go to a documentary or a book; but when
it comes to biographical films, I don’t mind if a filmmaker plays fast and loose with the
“facts” if in the end, what they deliver is some kind of “truth.”
And by that I mean, rather than simply chronicling the events
of an individual’s life, I prefer when the director and writer of a biopic find
a way to use the life story of a public figure to say something broader about humanity,
art, the creative process, cultural myths, or the pernicious lure of fame and the
American success ethic. In such instances, I gladly surrender encyclopedic accuracy
to creative interpretation.
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| Ken Russell claimed his film was not so much the story of Tchaikovsky as it was a commentary on the destructive force of dreams on reality |
So often, biopics hide behind the “based on true events” excuse to justify the overuse of clichés, coincidence, choppy storytelling, and flat characterizations. Storytelling flaws that would never pass muster in the construction of a purely fictional screenplay. I prefer when biographical movies make an attempt at hewing out a unique dramatic thrust of a story while still sticking somewhat closely to real-life events. Good biographical films are those which I can enjoy as stand-alone narratives. Stories that compel and keep my interest independent of any foreknowledge I have of the famous personality or the alleged veracity of the events depicted.
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| Tchaikovsky Triumphant What Price Success? |
By way of contrast, Alan Parker's 1996 musical Evita (a project to which Ken Russell was briefly attached) has a fascinating and incredibly complex individual at its center, but the movie is so lacking in a point of view or perspective about its subject (due more perhaps to the flaws inherent in Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice's treatment), the entire film - which seems comprised exclusively of processions and marches - has no narrative thrust beyond "It actually happened!" historical regurgitation.
The one director whom I consider to be one of the screen’s most gifted fictional documentarians is Ken Russell, a director whose biopics lean to the wildly subjective, daringly interpretive, and highly stylized. His films and BBC TV plays about the lives of Rudolph Valentino, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler, Henri Gaudier, Isadora Duncan, and Claude Debussy, are splendid paradoxes: they are frustratingly fruitless sources of biographical fact, yet they're bountiful vessels of emotional honesty.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The one director whom I consider to be one of the screen’s most gifted fictional documentarians is Ken Russell, a director whose biopics lean to the wildly subjective, daringly interpretive, and highly stylized. His films and BBC TV plays about the lives of Rudolph Valentino, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler, Henri Gaudier, Isadora Duncan, and Claude Debussy, are splendid paradoxes: they are frustratingly fruitless sources of biographical fact, yet they're bountiful vessels of emotional honesty.
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| Richard Chamberlain as Peter IlyichTchaikovsky |
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| Glenda Jackson as Antonina Milyukova |
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| Christopher Gable as Count Anton Chiluvsky |
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| Izabella Telezynska as Madame Nadejda von Meck |
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| Sabina Maydelle as Sasha Tchaikovsky |
Ken Russell first became known to American audiences (this
American audience, anyway) by way of his second film, the soporific 1967 Michael
Caine spy thriller Billion Dollar Brain
(his first feature film French
Dressing – 1964, I’ve yet to see). While he indisputably hit his artistic
stride with the poetic and well-received adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969), Ken Russell, the
baby-faced enfant terrible of cinematic excess who scandalized sensibilities and
drove Pauline Kael to distraction, didn’t really show his face until his fourth
film, the controversial and polarizing The
Music Lovers.
Based on the 1937 book Beloved Friend: The Story of Tchaikovsky and Nadejda von Meck, The Music Lovers is Ken Russell’s
fever-dream vision of the life of the famed 19th-century Russian
composer. And I’m not just using fever dream as an easy expression. At times The Music Lovers looks exactly like the
kind of overheated dream one would have after falling asleep listening to Tchaikovsky
while pulling an all-nighter studying for an exam on the composer.
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| Kenneth Colley as Modeste Tchaikovsky |
Originally titled The
Lonely Heart, the film’s full title: Ken
Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers clues us in that
this is to be Ken Russell’s uniquely personal, subjectively emotional (some
would say hysterical) look at the tortured life of the artist.
To the frenetic accompaniment of The Nutcracker’s “Dance of the Clowns,” the film’s first frames thrust
us directly into the center of the joyous revelries of a Moscow winter carnival. This moment is important
to savor, for it is one of the last times genuine happiness makes an appearance in the film outside of idealized images in impossible fantasies.
As he would do in his next film The Boy Friend (1971), Ken Russell uses the opening sequence of The Music Lovers to introduce all the film's major characters
in context of their personalities and interrelationships – present and
future – before we actually know who they are. This not only has the effect of heightening our visual alertness (we are asked to absorb and store narrative information we will draw upon later), but it invites us from the start to voluntarily surrender to what Russell will later demand: that we experience his film as pure sensation and emotion…just as one might experience Tchaikovsky’s compositions.
The full themes of The Music Lovers are revealed in the next sequence, which has all the individuals from the opening scene reassembled at the Moscow Conservatory on the occasion of Tchaikovsky’s debut of his Piano Concerto no.1 in B-flat Minor. Again utilizing a device employed to similar effect in The Boy Friend, Russell familiarizes us with the main players in his drama by granting us access to their fantasies and innermost desires. It is here that Tchaikovsky and each of his “loves” – his impassioned music; his sister Sasha, for whom he has a quasi-incestuous attachment; melancholy patron of the arts, Madame von Meck; the mentally unstable fantasist (and future wife of convenience) Nina; and his real but forbidden love, the foppish Count Chiluvsky – all reveal themselves to share a similar susceptibility and responsiveness to Romanticism and the Romantic Ideal.
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| Born This Way The Music Lovers presents Tchaikovsky's denial of his homosexuality as the source of his greatest torment. Our first glimpse of the composer, cavorting with his lover (Christopher Gable) at a winter fair, culminating in the pair collapsing drunk and contentedly in bed - is also the last time we ever see him happy |
The full themes of The Music Lovers are revealed in the next sequence, which has all the individuals from the opening scene reassembled at the Moscow Conservatory on the occasion of Tchaikovsky’s debut of his Piano Concerto no.1 in B-flat Minor. Again utilizing a device employed to similar effect in The Boy Friend, Russell familiarizes us with the main players in his drama by granting us access to their fantasies and innermost desires. It is here that Tchaikovsky and each of his “loves” – his impassioned music; his sister Sasha, for whom he has a quasi-incestuous attachment; melancholy patron of the arts, Madame von Meck; the mentally unstable fantasist (and future wife of convenience) Nina; and his real but forbidden love, the foppish Count Chiluvsky – all reveal themselves to share a similar susceptibility and responsiveness to Romanticism and the Romantic Ideal.
The inherent unattainability of said ideal suggested by the
extravagant-bordering-on-absurd visual extremes of each fantasy; its
anguish reflected in the real-life self-contradiction that has nearly everyone in question falling
desperately in love with precisely the person least capable of returning it.
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| Max Adrian as Nicholas Rubinstein |
With desire charting the path of the conjoined destinies of
these individuals, The Music Lovers
takes the position that Tchaikovsky, a gay man tortured by his homosexuality
and his inability to lead a life of emotional truth, poured all of his impassioned
fantasies and romantic dreams into his music. In centering his film on an
artist who struggled to create artistic truth while being untrue to himself,
Russell provocatively posits whether an inauthentic life can
ever produce authentic art.
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| Portrait of the Artist as a Babe In photographing Tchaikovsky in a manner redolent of Hollywood's glamorized biographies of historical figures, Ken Russell mocks the romantic myth of artists nobly suffering for their craft |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I didn’t see The Music
Lovers when it was first released, but following on the heels of the
comparatively restrained Women in Love,
I can only imagine what a shock to the system Russell's horrorshow take on the life of Tchaikovsky was to 1970 audiences. After all these years I think The Music Lovers' brash imagery, feverish performances and bold disregard for conventional storytelling (and historical accuracy) still
has the power to astonish.
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| Phallic Frenzy Ken Russell's signature penis-themed imagery appears in this fantasy sequence in which Modeste, Tchaikovsky's pragmatic brother, vanquishes the parasitic "music lovers" in the composer's life |
In no way, shape, or form is this a movie for all tastes.
And indeed, I would agree with those who say it is fairly valueless as
biography (although it did serve to spark my interest in the composer and led
me to seek out the more traditional – but arguably just as false – Russian film on
Tchaikovsky released in 1972) .
However, speaking as a confirmed dreamer, fantasist, and
head-in-the-clouds romantic, I can’t praise Ken Russell enough for dramatizing in
The Music Lovers precisely the
conundrum that has always intrigued me about the arts, creativity, and the role
of fantasy in our lives.
A spirited inner life is the common byproduct when restrictions
are placed on the free expression and development of one’s true nature. So by
framing the film’s central conflict around Tchaikovsky’s well-founded inability
to come to terms with his homosexuality (it was illegal in Russia) and
subsequent need to suppress his natural romantic desires in order to pursue his
art (something Richard Chamberlain knew a thing or two about); The Music Lovers effectively explores fantasy
from both sides of the issue.
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| Fear of scandal and a denial of self inspires Tchaikovsky to shun the affections of his lover, preferring instead to hide behind his sham marriage and his long-distance infatuation with benefactress, Madame von Meck |
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| Bad Romance Following an established pattern, Nina works herself into a romantic delirium over an unprepossessing Russian hussar she's never met (actor Ben Aris, who played Sally Simpson's proselytizing father in Ken Russell's Tommy). |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
It's really saying something to note that in a resolutely emotional movie about a man who wrote resolutely emotional music, the central relationship between Tchaikovsky and Antonina “Nina”
Milyukova stands out as one of the most impassioned. Tchaikovsky, against the wishes
of his family and in an effort to conform to societal pressure, did in fact impulsively
marry a woman he barely knew, a young music student from his conservatory. Their marriage was disastrous, the composer remaining married (the better to deflect rumors of his homosexuality) but deserting his wife within weeks of their wedding.
As envisioned by Russell, Tchaikovsky marries out of rebellious
self-denial and romantic self-delusion, while Nina (Jackson) is depicted as just another
dreamy fantasist. A mentally and emotionally unstable woman given to reckless romantic
infatuations who sets her sights on wooing the composer because of his fame and
stature. (I personally reject the nymphomaniac label, even in Russell's vision, simply
because I’m weary of it being the lazy go-to word used by men who don’t know what
else to call an actively sexual woman.)
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| Nina Meets Her Rival Costume designer Shirley Russell uses color to emphasize the connection between Tchaikovsky's actual and illusory loves. Christopher Gable & Richard Chamberlain later co-starred in the 1976 musical The Slipper and the Rose |
Biographers don’t tend to devote much space to the marriage, but Russell depicts Nina, and Tchaikovsky's cruel treatment of her, as a symbol of the film's theme. She's a tragic figure representing the destructive side of reality avoidance, her mental and emotional deterioration a hysterical indictment of Tchaikovsky's weakness of character and the false promises held forth by his unabashedly romantic compositions.
The Music Lovers' most controversial scene (of many, I assure you) is the honeymoon train journey which finds the visibly repulsed Tchaikovsky trapped in a tiny carriage car with his drunk, sexually rapacious bride. As the car jostles violently back and forth, Nina, now nude and unconscious, rolls about on the floor as Tchaikovsky literally climbs the walls in horror and disgust.
None of it should work (it's practically a burlesque of a gay man's reaction to seeing a vagina) but somehow it does.
And that the sexually-conflicted composer should be portrayed by
a sexually-conflicted actor (Richard Chamberlain came out in 2003 when he was 68 years old) adds heaps of unexpected subtext to the already over-the-top proceedings.
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| In this scene from Russell's Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson) and the artist Loerke (Vladek Sheybal) engage in a bit of play-acting, assuming the roles of Nina and Tchaikovsky during their honeymoon journey on the Trans-Siberian Express (minus the nude rolling about on the floor part). |
Although my childhood is full of memories of my sister's major crush on Richard Chamberlain during his Dr. Kildare days, I can't say that I've actually seen him in very much. Certainly not enough to gauge how successful he was in his bid to shed his teen heartthrob image and be taken seriously as an actor. I do know that as leading men go, he's very easy on the eyes, and that I can find no fault with his performance here. Called upon to depict Tchaikovsky as a man of near-operatic heights of anguish and rapturous longing, Chamberlain, in perhaps his least decorative role ever, is more animated and vivid than I've ever seen him.
It's Glenda Jackson, already a personal favorite, who stands out most in my memory. Delivering an affecting performance that can also be as broad as a barn when required, she's just a marvel to behold. Her showier scenes got all the critical notice (and lambasting), but it's her smaller moments (like the range of emotions that play across her face when she meets Tchaikovsky for the first time) that make her Nina a rivetingly sympathetic, dynamic, ultimately pitiable character.
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| Nina Ends Her Days In An Insane Asylum |
I don't have the space to pay tribute to them all, but the entire cast of The Music Lovers is uniformly top-notch. Fans of Ken Russell will recognize his familiar band of repertory players, each contributing invaluably to the whole.
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| Beloved Friend In love with both the man and his music, wealthy widow Madame von Meck (here with her twin sons) supports Tchaikovsky for thirteen years and is content to love him from afar |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Ken Russell is known for being a visual director, and on that score, The Music Lovers doesn't disappoint. The lush imagery and sumptuous costumes are more than a match for Tchaikovsky's colorful compositions. But because Russell's films are such an assault on the senses, I sometimes think the soundness of the ideas behind his films get shortchanged.
My appreciation of The Music Lovers is rooted not in its status as biography, but in its thought-provoking themes examining the origins of artistic creativity and the heavy price that's often extracted.
When Richard Chamberlain came out as gay in his 2003 memoir Shattered Love, one of the things he was fond of saying during his media tour was that after a lifetime of living in fear, how liberating it was to finally be himself. Yet one of his strongest epiphanies was the realization that his being gay was the least interesting, most benign thing about him.
While I've no doubt of this being Chamberlain's reality, his observation fascinated me. It fascinated me because of its failure to recognize (or accept) that if one's sexuality prompts one to spend an entire life "in the closet" and engaged in the non-stop denial of one's true nature, it can hardly be called a benign issue because a lifetime of self-rejection HAS to shape personality, perception, and reality.
In the context of what Ken Russell explores in The Music Lovers, it's inconceivable to me that a life lived in total denial of who one actually is would fail to leave a mark on the soul of any sensitive individual...on the soul of an artist, most acutely.
In all its frenetic hysteria, The Music Lovers asks us to entertain the possibility that Peter Tchaikovsky, a romantic prohibited from freely expressing love as he would choose, was forced, because of his homosexuality, to channel all of his tortured emotions, suppressed pain, and unexpressed passion into his music. Russell doesn't use Tchaikovsky's homosexuality for shock value or fodder for gossip; he makes a case for the artist's socially-unacceptable sexuality being the very source of his creative genius. In Russell's vision, Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is neither benign nor unimportant...it is the defining aspect in the shaping of the man's character and the cause of his heartfelt romantic longing.
Leave it to Ken Russell - instead of just another biopic heralding the achievements of a famed composer, he constructed a sensual think-piece that invites me to contemplate the art as well as the artist.
My appreciation of The Music Lovers is rooted not in its status as biography, but in its thought-provoking themes examining the origins of artistic creativity and the heavy price that's often extracted.
When Richard Chamberlain came out as gay in his 2003 memoir Shattered Love, one of the things he was fond of saying during his media tour was that after a lifetime of living in fear, how liberating it was to finally be himself. Yet one of his strongest epiphanies was the realization that his being gay was the least interesting, most benign thing about him.
In the context of what Ken Russell explores in The Music Lovers, it's inconceivable to me that a life lived in total denial of who one actually is would fail to leave a mark on the soul of any sensitive individual...on the soul of an artist, most acutely.
In all its frenetic hysteria, The Music Lovers asks us to entertain the possibility that Peter Tchaikovsky, a romantic prohibited from freely expressing love as he would choose, was forced, because of his homosexuality, to channel all of his tortured emotions, suppressed pain, and unexpressed passion into his music. Russell doesn't use Tchaikovsky's homosexuality for shock value or fodder for gossip; he makes a case for the artist's socially-unacceptable sexuality being the very source of his creative genius. In Russell's vision, Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is neither benign nor unimportant...it is the defining aspect in the shaping of the man's character and the cause of his heartfelt romantic longing.
Leave it to Ken Russell - instead of just another biopic heralding the achievements of a famed composer, he constructed a sensual think-piece that invites me to contemplate the art as well as the artist.
BONUS MATERIAL
The reason for this film's windy full title: Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers, was so as not to be confused with the Russian film Tchaikovsky by Igor Talankin that came out that same year. (A 1970 production not released in the U.S. until 1972).
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| Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Tchaikovsky |
