‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’ Review: Kirill Serebrennikov’s Perplexing, Music-Free Biopic Bungles a Great Subject

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticBack when art house movies played full-time in art houses, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” at least on paper, might have seemed a film of middlebrow commercial hooks — the sort of movie that would have slipped into the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York and played there comfortably for a month or so.

The first hook, of course, is Tchaikovsky himself, the Russian composer who created works of such timeless and popular beauty that he is always in danger, in an odd way, of being underrated, like the Spielberg of longhairs.

Tchaikovsky’s short-lived marriage, to Antonina Miliukova, was both a disaster and a semi-scandal, but the time now feels ripe for a rediscovery of this tragic episode, which hinged on Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and the fact that he agreed to marry as a desperate closeted strategic ploy.

That the late 19th century was a time when even an artist of his magnitude could not live openly, and women as a “class” were every bit as restricted in their choices, sounds like fodder for a biographical drama that could touch on issues of repression and liberation in our own time. “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” however, is not that movie.