Antonia falls lightning-fast in love with Tchaikovsky; hers becomes an obsession. The mystery of falling in love and the sentimental transport that clouds the mind, as if it were a spell, a magical act.

"Love is a beautiful flower, but one must have the courage to pluck it on the brink of an abyss," said Stendhal, Antonia decides to pluck such a flower despite the fact that the beloved himself has told her that he has no feelings for her, the man is homosexual and Antonia knows it, but her feeling is stoic and inescapable. The utter idolatry she feels will drive her to madness, like the Adele H. of Truffaut's famous cult film.

Dizzying long takes, leaden cinematography, the articulate and baroque film technique is functional in describing the seething passion/obsession gripping the protagonist.

"Tchaikovsky's Wife" is an imposing melodrama capable of using Antonia to narrate the figure of the imprisoned woman in patriarchal nineteenth-century Russia (for many cultures and in many countries of the world, things have not changed that much); in fact, the film is not titled Antonia, but the wife of..

Tchaikovsky's character is elusive, for a long part of the film he is not present, it is all encapsulated in Antonia's mind, his absence becomes feverish possession, love mauling everything like a ravenous beast, making the protagonist stubborn but a loser, a mournful figure squeezed into suffocating bodices, roaming the streets of a devastated, filthy city, overflowing with freaks: obese prostitutes, beggars, crippled dogs.

Serebrennikov plunges Antonia into an anguished universe, where there is no light but only shadow, darkness, the darkness of a woman's mind crushed by society.

Love is not a saving force, it is a hellish journey to the end of the night, it is a macabre dance within which repressed feelings, unconfessed sexual urges, states of hallucination, repentance and psychic distortions explode.

A ruthless work that shows in no uncertain terms how much a love story can be a horror story. Tchaikovsky is an absent presence who constantly presses Antonia, she has decided to live for him, to have no revolutionary behavior, she is totally crushed by an ambiguous and elusive, but not evil, male. Mad is her stubbornness, mad is her choice to follow the musician everywhere, mad is her wandering at the end of the film swaddled in filthy clothes.

"Tchaikovsky's Wife" is a sentimental drama of extraordinary strength, an impetuous amour fou, it is an exasperated reflection on human feelings that survive any distortion. Antonia's psychic structure is shaped by the era in which she lives. Women must find husbands and not build independence, the only passion they are allowed is for a man. The social claustrophobia is violent; the film's protagonist is its sacrificial victim.

If Marco Bellocchio in "Vincere" associated the stubbornness of Ida's character, who was in love with Mussolini, with the masses applauding the Duce's monologues, Serebrennikov makes a similar point by turning Antonia into a metaphor for the idolatry of fans toward famous people.

Monumental.

23-Oct-2023 by Emanuele