Rent The Music Lovers (1971)

Mad for the Music - The Music Lovers review by griggs

It’s hard not to get swept up in a film that comes at Tchaikovsky’s life with this much swagger. Historical accuracy shows its face now and then, but you can tell it wasn’t invited to stay long. What Ken Russell serves instead is a full-blown fever dream: big emotions, bold imagery, and enough theatrical flair to power an opera house. I expected a mess and ended up thinking, “Alright, this actually works.”

The cast carry a lot of the weight. Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky like a man always on the edge of a confession — twitchy and oddly charming. Glenda Jackson is wild, heartbreaking, and magnetic in ways you can’t quite shake. She winds Antonina so tightly you’re surprised she doesn’t spark. Everyone else orbits them at a safe distance, which feels about right given the emotional weather.

Russell, meanwhile, directs as if revelling in every bar of the score. The production design is lush without tipping into parody, and even when the film goes off the rails — and it does — it somehow manages it with style. The whole thing has a visual confidence that lets you forgive its more unhinged detours.

What surprised me most, though, was how the excess circles something sincere. Beneath the whirl of colours and operatic meltdowns, there’s a real attempt to tap into the emotional voltage of Tchaikovsky’s music. You feel the longing, the frustration, the sense of a man composing his way out of corners he can’t escape in life. It’s messy, loud, and sometimes daft, but every so often it hits a note so nakedly heartfelt you lean in. For a film this wild, that honesty lands with a thump.

Best Ever Ken Russell Film - The Music Lovers review by PV

I loved this film. I watched it on TV in the 80s or 90s, but saw so much when watching it again. True, I do love the music of Tchaivovsky, which helps, but I think most people would love this movie. It's fun, exhuberant, theatrical, interesting and risky - all the things most if not all movies by Brit directors are not these days. The screenplay is from a book by a relative of the composer's sponsor, so it's all pretty true and a cracking good tragic story too. The only inaccuracy is that Peter Tchaivoksky's death came about because he made a pass at the Tsar's nephew - buy anyhow, the film rises and falls like a great symphony....................................... Just as tragic really to think that Ken Russell could not get funding from the BBC or Channel 4 (which is funded by our BBC cash) to make any films whatsoever in the last 25 years of his life - so self-funded and financed small digital video movies. And yet our money financed dross like Sex Lives of the Potato Men and loads of gritty, realistic, utterly tedious films by young Scottish female directors...

Brazen But Tedious Biopic - The Music Lovers review by GI

Typically oddball and peculiar film from director Ken Russell that focuses on the traumatic sex life of famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain). It's a sumptuous piece of cinema recreating a lively 18th Century Russia for this biopic of the composer who struggles with his homosexuality, plagued by his former lover who constantly reminds him of it so he marries in haste the gold digging and nymphomaniac Nina (Glenda Jackson) with whom he is unable to consummate the marriage. He also has a borderline unhealthy relationship with his sister and is plagued by the memory of the death of his mother from cholera. Whilst the narrative plods on getting evermore bizarre the soundtrack gives you the music that dominates the entire film. Ken Russell has his admirers but this film has indications of the surreal and utterly weird and confrontational style he is famed for. In some ways an interesting example of a unique cinematic style in others a tedious film with extreme characters and no sense of itself.