By Vivaan Shah
Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! For the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are hear as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flightWhere ignorant armies clash by night.
-MATTHEW ARNOLD
I have been searching for Ken Russell’s
1970 film about Tchaikovsky—‘The Music Lovers’—for the longest time. Very few
DVDs of it exist, I even tried ordering one of them from Amazon.uk but it was
too expensive. I finally found it on a streaming site called bmovies and
although I am not a proponent of online viewing, I found myself compelled to watch
it then and there.
Since it was reviled and pretty unanimously
despised by critics on its release, history has not been particularly kind to
the film, and it has silently faded into obscurity, neglected for reassessment.
In some circles it is considered a garish private fantasy, a shamefully
unfaithful retelling of Tchaikovsky’s life, and among Russell fanatics, one of
his best works but not nearly as discussed and dissected as his more notable
films such as ‘The Devils’ and ‘Women in Love’. In fact Pauline Kael even went
so far as to say, ‘You really feel like driving a stake through the heart of the
man that made that film.’ It is understandable to see why she felt that way,
but yet equally baffling considering she championed the similarly visceral
works of Sam Peckinpah (easily the film maker closest to Russell in terms of
sheer Dionysian mania), Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese. But what set Russell
apart from his American counter parts was his British boisterousness, his sense
of the theatrical, his visual wit, his unhinged transgressions and his lucid visions
that seemed to have crept right out of Goya’s or Francis Bacon’s more demonic
paintings. His technique is as hyper kinetic and frenzied as Scorsese’s, as is
his use of music, his use of slow motion rivals that of Peckinpah, his visual
prose is as floral as Fellini’s, and his wicked sense of humour and the
underlying tension in scenes of the mundane can compete only with a Kubrick. In
fact the film that can be most closely compared with this one is 2001: A Space Odyssey in its near wordless design. It plays almost like a silent film in
parts, the camera swaying melodically to the strains of Swan Lake, or that
vivid opening scene scored entirely like a aria to ‘The Dance
of the Clowns’. There is no sense in trying to describe this film in terms of
plot, suffice to say that it is a love story between a nymphomaniac and a
homosexual, which is apparently the way Russell pitched it to Harry Saltzman,
the producer of his previous film Women in Love. A love quadrangle of dizzying
rythms and a tone poem that tranquilizes Keats’ conceptions of the self right
out into the flesh, in terms of the ecclesiastical- ‘ecstasis’. The image of a moving train rocking Glenda Jackson back and
forth in a coital frenzy is wound up with a Wagnerian nightmarishness.
Russell’s preoccupation with Catholicism
isn’t brought under the microscope here, as it would be in his all his
subsequent works, instead he chose to elaborate and expand from Women in Love
on the pastoral imagery of most 19th Century Romanticism. The sense of yearning
is absolute, almost sublime, as is the nostalgia without nausea in the
Proustian tradition. The sense that the past exists in the present, and the
psychological landscape of Tchaikovsky that resulted in his music. Roger Ebert
criticized this film on the grounds that it assumed most works of artistic
inspiration were born out of the folly of the passing moment, a beautiful
sunset, a thunderstorm, the roar of a canon, instead of through honest toil and
hard rigour. Russell would go on to correct this in his film about the sculptor
Henri-Gaudier Breszka ‘Savage Messiah’ which features a scene of the eponymous
sculptor chiselling away at a slab of stone till the wee hours of the night
while relating the story of a little bird. ‘The rent never sleeps’ Dorothy
Tuttin’s character asserts while working her fingers to the bone. That art comes
into existence through sheer hard work is not something that was alien to
Russell, he wasn’t that much of a Romanticist. He perhaps belonged more to the
Baroque Gothic tradition as is apparent in his hallucinatory montage of the
1812 overture which charts in an almost vaudeville like comic fashion the
bastardizing influence money can have on art. Tchaikovsky ends up as a conductor
deliriously waving his magic wand atop the Kremlin while his brother dutifully
collects the fateful notes blowing the wind. The film proposes the question at
what cost? Glenda Jackson, essaying his neglected wife in what is possibly her
finest performance, ends up in a female mental asylum surrounded my haggard, leprous,
deformed, geriatric, gargoyled, almost mutant women. That particular scene is
startlingly shocking and the stuff that nightmares are made of. The film goes
over to an almost other realm of disturbing with that sequence.
Glenda Jackson’s voice resonates the
deepest fibre of the material in her harrowing turn as Tchaikovsky’s neglected
wife. The emotional sophistication of her performance and the sexual hysteria
that resides within it supply the film with some of its most psychosomatically
charged imagery. The scene in which she wails ‘Don’t I live?’ in torment, is
almost too difficult to watch because of the emotional violence of it.
The film is probably the purest expression
of Opera ever committed to celluloid. It swells and swoons, roars, crashes,
thunders, writhes, gyrates in agonized contortions and literally explodes
towards the end. It’s almost as if Russell’s films have so much energy that
cinema cannot contain them. It’s no surprise that he was considered by the
major studios to be the most dangerously eccentric film maker of all time, what
they perhaps failed to realize is that he was also the most poetic. He made
films on the lives of all kinds of classical composers from Delius to Debussy,
to Richard Wagner to Gustav Mahler but for me this one stands out as the most
cinematic. Never before had he been afforded this kind of scale, this grandeur
and this vitality. After Tommy and The Devils for me this is possibly his best
film, and one of the most cathartic cinema watching experiences I have ever
encountered.
About Author -
Vivaan Shah is an actor, director, writer, musician, singer, and painter. He has tried his hands at various art forms though acting is the one through which he earns his bread and butter. He studied in The Doon School, St.Stephen's College and Jai Hind College. He has been active in the theatre scene since he was a child. Theatre is unquestionably the most important medium in his life. Currently he is trying to make it as a fiction writer of genre and hardboiled novels. This is the first time he has ever written about a film.
The Music Lovers - Theatrical Trailer (YouTube)
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