The Music Lovers (1971) Queer Film (F)

The Music Lovers (1971), Ken Russell’s operatic biopic of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (played by gay actor Richard Chamberlain), dramatizes the composer’s disastrous marriage to Nina (Glenda Jackson), his suppressed homosexuality, and the emotional storms that fed his music.

Perhaps Russell’s most flamboyant film—and that’s saying something—The Music Lovers is a landmark of early 1970s queer cinema, but largely for the wrong reasons. Its frank, stylized depiction of Tchaikovsky’s sexuality is notable, yet the film is essentially one vulgar, over-the-top Russell fantasia after another. It’s MTV avant la lettre: all sensation, no modulation.

The notorious “1812 Overture” honeymoon montage—a delirious collision of sexual frustration, nationalistic bombast, and pure Russell excess—is strictly for the director’s most devoted cultists.

Glenda Jackson’s Nina is rendered as both victim and monster, and Jackson herself is put through an astonishing degree of cinematic humiliation. You feel for her. The train sequence alone should qualify as grounds for an artistic malpractice suit.

Chamberlain, meanwhile, gives what can only be described as a non-performance: all ham, no depth. He looks the part, he suffers beautifully, but there’s nothing going on behind the eyes. To his credit, his pianism—he was a trained musician—is the one area where he truly shines.

The screenplay, such as it is, comes from Melvyn Bragg. The one unqualified triumph is Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography, which is ravishing even when the film around it is not.

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