Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

01 March 2022

The Music Lovers (1971)

Ken Russell's The Music Lovers is a really bananas film – with surreal sequences and much of the film set to Tchaikovsky's music without dialogue. Glenda Jackson is out of control, but then she's playing an insane nymphomaniac trying to make the homosexually inclined Pyotr Tchaikovsky love her. It doesn't work. 

Russell's film compares poorly with Igor Talankin's film Tchaikovsky (Чайковский) from 1970 (1972 in the U.S.), which is sumptuous but which I found cold and uninterested in Tchaikovsky's actual life. Russell's version of the Tchaikovsky story really tries to figure out who the man was, but The Music Lovers winds up being a kind of overwrought melodrama

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