THE MORNING LIST
A great diversity – of films by great masters and a new signature – is to be discovered in theaters this week: descent into the amorous hells (Tchaikovsky’s Wife)luminous portrait of an artist (The Novelist, the film and happy coincidence)social thriller (The Sandman), but also two covers from the 1970s, Be beautiful and stop talking by Delphine Seyrig, and The Great Rifles held hands down by Alain Delon.
“Tchaikovsky’s Wife”: Serebrennikov’s radical gesture
Like porcelain wrapped in black fishnet, Tchaikovsky’s Wife opens with the face of a widow at the funeral home. The famous composer died in Saint Petersburg and he will continue to haunt his wife as he did during his lifetime. In a dense and haunting flashback of more than two hours, Kirill Serebrennikov looks back on their fatal marriage sealed at the Saint-Georges church, in Moscow, in 1877.
Antonina (Alyona Mikhailova), a well-to-do young girl in her twenties, studies the piano at the Conservatory despite the teachers’ lack of interest in ladies. Tchaikovsky (Odin Biron) is already an established composer on the verge of becoming a national legend when he proposes to her. He acts by social convention: the love she has for him is not reciprocated. Consumed by her feelings, Antonina will agree to endure everything to stay with her husband, whose homosexuality she denies.
The Russian filmmaker chooses to (almost) never show the musician at work. Left behind, the master’s piano will finally appear wrapped in a white sheet like a shroud. He even goes further, leveling the genius of Tchaikovsky when he cinematographically deprives him of his hands. On the contrary, he multiplies the close-ups on those of his wife to make us feel his frustration: prohibited from strumming – a profession for men, he is told – and from touching the body of her husband who literally suffocates at his touch. One could see in Serebrennikov’s gesture a form of punishment addressed by a dissident artist to a hero of the nation. Mr. Dl
Russian film by Kirill Serebrennikov. With Alyona Mikhaïlova and Odin Biron (2 h 23).
“The Novelist, the film and happy coincidence”: bouquet of shots by Hong Sang-soo
With his tiny budget films, shot by hand with small crews, and chained to hell (on average two a year), South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is committed to the path of radical shedding – both technical and narrative – which brings it closer in autonomy to the gesture of the painter. After right before your eyes (2022), the filmmaker finds in The Romance… actress Lee Hye-young, glory of the 1980s, and plunges her into a wandering in the present, engaging the past and the future. Jun-hee, her character, is a renowned writer who has come to spend a day strolling in the distant suburbs of Seoul, where a series of encounters will pave the way for renewal.
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