The Music Lovers

Straub-Huillet have an idea about classical composers, just still figures in a chamber with music, elsewhere Ken Russell makes a case for "the savage method." It kicks off with a Doctor Zhivago lampoon in a blur of carousing amid snow, one of the revelers is Tchaikovsky himself (Richard Chamberlain) collapsing with his boyfriend in a Matisse red bedroom. It's not easy at the Moscow Conservatory with gossip and Rubinstein's disapproval, still he tears into the Piano Concerto No. 1 and each of the women in his life soars into ecstatic reveries. A past of river boats and white linen (the image is from Wild Strawberries) for the beloved sister (Sabina Maydelle), the libidinous admirer (Glenda Jackson) hungers for carriages and spreads like Messalina. The Platonic patroness (Izabella Telezynska) surveys from afar: "There are some things that even a man of his genius has to find out for himself." The fever of artistry and the absurdity of normalcy, stately 19th-century décor through flushed lenses, the whole Russell megillah. Stimuli perpetually flowing and clashing, a raucous soiree where a sweet maternal voice becomes a scalding death scream. The comedy of the queer maestro hitched to the wanton "not satisfied with spiritual relationships," a camera obscura at the St. Petersburg honeymoon is the perfect peepshow after Swan Lake. (Pathéthique Symphony underscores the magnificently nauseous train ride, with its unforgettable view of a corset's vaginal tunnel.) "If it's love you want, an audience will give it to you," a manager's line. The auteur at his lowest, clawed and shivering and waist-deep in sludge, then at his highest leading a cannonade against his foes, streamers and bells and all. (Russell helps himself to 8½ for the 1812 Overture, Fellini returns the compliment in Casanova.) So it goes with Romantics, to the cauldron or the madhouse or the Seventies studio, "a matter of temperament." Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe. With Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, Kenneth Colley, and Maureen Pryor.