On Screen

...But Russell could not have concocted this much gook without accomplices...

...I wonder what Russell is trying to say with this film, even on his own shoddy level...

...When the unsympathetic Modeste, after a long session of searching for a title for the Sixth Symphony, sneeringly calls his brother pathetic, Piotr can with ironic superiority thank him for his precious help and actually name the work Symphonie pathetique...

...These women--Nina, the wife, and Madame von Meek, the patroness--were undoubtedly interesting figures, but hardly, I dare say, the outrageous grotesques that the film turns them into...

...The one time it is, presumably, spoken--into the ear of Tchaikovsky's good angel, Mme von Meek, by his evil demon, Count Chiluvsky--it is deliberately drowned out by the explosions of fireworks...

...She allows the camera to photograph her from the most prying angles, including one shot up her anus and vagina, which, combining with the frenzy of the montage--the food and drink (the couple have just eaten) spilling and scattering, a rapid-fire catalogue of Miss Jackson's physical uglinesses from face to feet--makes for some of the most hateful viewing in all my film-going experience...

...There are quite a few of the old Hollywood lives-of-famous-men cliches in the film...

...But Russell is an oversimplifier, a vulgarizer--not, in itself, an unuseful thing to be, in a middlebrow-oriented society that needs its Will Durante and John Gunthers...

...Added to the awkwardnesses of a somewhat flaccid body are the horrors of the torture and the hideousness of cankers disfiguring both body and face...

...The Strauss TV film, however, is, apparently, hateful: It makes Strauss out to have been a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and, consequently, a worthless composer...

...The last of these is said to be very fine...

...But they are only after the cheap hindsight-irony the scene contains: Something for the unwashed to laugh at, even though they are the very ones who would have had no use for Tchaikovsky then, and doubtless still prefer Richard Rodgers or Janis Joplin to the likes of him...

...Though I am not a great admirer of most of Tchaikovsky's music, seeing the man and his work thus insulted and degraded obliges me to hasten to his defense...

...The compartment is luridly lit, the train bounces around like a billygoat, the handheld camera practically turns somersaults...

...But whereas the physical similarity between the filmmaker and the performer continues, Leaud has become one of the emptiest, most deadpan, least suggestive actors around...

...The films about Antoine Doinel (Truffaut's name for his amiably altered ego) have steadily decreased in quality since The 400 Blows, and in this one pussyfooting cuteness preponderates...

...A considerably better film, yet also a considerably bigger disappointment, is the latest and supposedly last installment in Truffaut's semifictional screen autobiography, Bed and Board...

...Thus he makes the composer's brother, Modeste, not a solicitous helper and fellow homosexual, but a callow, exploiting heterosexual...

...When there are too few comic overtones, or too many, or when he tries for straight comedy, things have a way of going wrong...

...Stefan Kanfer of Time is right to point out that Russell is heavily influenced by Peter Brook's theatrical productions...

...Russell (on film rather than paper, but the principle is the same) does something else: He wallows in his melodramatic, scabrous, sensationalistic fantasies, and attempts to elevate and legitimize them by draping them round the defenseless figure of a dead genius...

...Richard Chamberlain tries (as he does throughout) to look sensitive and suffering, and Miss Jackson proceeds to strip to the buff in order to seduce him...

...But although Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is very nearly the center of the movie, not only is the problem denied an iota of serious examination, the very word is never pronounced in this film that dare not speak its theme...

...In the film's most nauseating scene, Piotr and Nina get drunk on the train carrying them back from their unsuccessful honeymoon...

...This honor was to be reserved for Ken Russell's The Music Lovers, a movie that, during three separate sequences, had my stomach turning in unison with Tchaikovsky's body in the grave...

...yet I am sure Russell would have a fit if his "work of art" were likened to this banal family entertainment...

...Because if both brothers were pederasts, we would not, I dare say, have the cozy distinction between the sensitive but sick artist and the crass but healthy philistine, which best serves Russell's simplistic and flashy taste...

...Readers will remember that I was not much impressed by Russell's Women in Love...

...As she defiantly sniggers at her appalled visiting mother, the madmen's hands reach up under Nina's skirt to indulge in a gang-diddling...

...Russell, characteristically, leaps at any ugliness he can drag in...

...And there would then be no crude and convenient butt for Piotr Ilyich's superior, artistic witticisms...

...Truffaut picked Leaud for The 400 Blows because the boy rather resembled him in appearance and had a similar dropout and reform-school background...

...Having played in so many Godard and quasi-Godardian films has dehumanized Leaud even further...

...Actually, Truffaut is not a comic filmmaker at all: His best efforts are, always, serious films laced with comic touches...

...Unfortunately, I have not seen Russell's BBC documentaries on, among others, Delius, Richard Strauss, and Isadora Duncan...

...Jean-Pierre Leaud, so moving as an adolescent, has grown into an unprepossessing young man...

...Now, for example, he introduces such running gags as a chap who keeps borrowing more and more money from Antoine, and a mysterious stranger who turns out to be something quite different from what he is taken for (a device used much better, because in a less pat way, in Stolen Kisses...

...We do, however, get another revolting hot bath routine, now with Piotr Ilyich as the agonizing victim...

...There is the obligatory scene where "Rubinstein" (Anton and Nicholas fused...

...Not only is each of these sequences like a collection of tawdry picture postcards, they all have a way of looking ultimately alike...

...The inept psychiatricizing consists of making Tchaikovsky excessively involved with his mother and, especially, his sister--then, without examining either of these propositions more than cursorily, embroidering heavenly and hellish visions around them...

...Mme von Meek, for example, is supplied with two creepy sons, a blond Tweedledee and his black-haired Tweedledum twin, derived from the two eunuchs as visualized by Brook in his production of Diirrenmatt's The Visit...

...Now this is not to be confused with your average "fictionalized biography," where the author makes use of all available biographical data and fills in the story with his own interpretations and speculations, including imaginary but plausible dialogue...

...But what, finally, is Truffaut trying to say with Bed and Board...

...What seems to fascinate Russell and his scenarist (the same Melvyn Bragg who collaborated on the poor screenplay of The Loves of Isadora) even more than their ex-eponymous hero, are the two women in his life other than his mother and sister...

...There is, I think, not a little truth in that, even if nary a Rubinstein ever uttered it, and Russell and his scenarist might have stopped to consider how informed musical opinion rates the piece...

...Tchaikovsky was a homosexual in a society that viewed inversion intolerantly and repressively--as, to a lesser extent, our society still does...

...Moreover, there might be something less romantic about a mamma who turns all her sons into inverts...

...And we realize finally that the whole thing is Ken Russell's daydream: life, art, history as seen through the eye of a megalomaniacal interior, or, more exactly, exterior decorator...

...Even that has always seemed to me, except in the case of masterpieces like Graves' I, Claudius, a not quite reputable genre...

...Claude Jade is a likable Christine, Hiroko Berghauer an exquisite Kyoko...

...The jokes are not funny, because they are dragged in arbitrarily and irrelevantly, and their spacing and timing are sloppy...

...From a major filmmaker, that is a minor but distinct sin...

...Nadezhda von Meek, on the other hand, is presented as a painfully plain, hyperemotional pseudo-esthete, who, though never meeting him (which is, historically, more or less true), passionately licks a peach Tchaikovsky has bitten into and abandoned, or sneaks into his room and lies down beside him while he sleeps and has a kind of Platonic orgasm induced by sheer parallelism...

...Truffaut is further hampered here by the unhappy way his fictional stand-in has developed...

...Later we see Tchaikovsky wooing his mother's kind of death by drinking a glass of unboiled water during a cholera epidemic...

...For the film purports to be a biography of the famous Russian composer, and is so bad and distasteful that, besides ruining whatever reputation Russell may have, it puts a serious dent in Tchaikovsky's...

...The film gives no offense, and no enlightenment...

...In addition, one is forced to wonder why anyone hires this inveterate incompetent, both accident-prone and supine, and what on earth the piquant and spunkily crackling Christine (petillante is the mot juste, but missing in English) and the lovely and patient Kyoko could possibly find lovable about him...

...He is, apparently, hinting at some sort of description of how a young artist is formed: Very unconvinc-ingly Leaud-Doinel is beginning to write a novel in this film...

...Nestor Almendros' color cinematography is getting better, though it has quite a way to go yet to catch up with Raoul Coutard's, and there are a few droll moments in the story and staging...

...if that theme moved Russell, it could have yielded, even at this late date, a film of interest and humanitarian impact...

...There have been underground obscenities and aboveground monstrosities galore, but none succeeded in making me actually physically sick...

...But a vulgarizer who is himself preeminently vulgar and egregiously uninterested in truth is a reprehensible figure...

...Antoine's job-bungling becomes tiresome from sheer predictability and from a kind of impatience with detail Truffaut here alarmingly exhibits...

...When Tchaikovsky performs at the Moscow Conservatory, we keep crosscutting from him to the film's principal characters conveniently foregathered in the audience, and to their concurrent daydreams...

...This last finally drives the poor thing utterly mad...

...Antoine is married to Christine, whom he was courting in Stolen Kisses, and they lead a hectic newlyweds' life...

...Russell does not want to get involved in any honest analysis: Dishonest tamperings with fact seem to suit him much better...

...He looks like a typical young Parisian hoodlum, has the facial expressions of a sleepwalking gutter rat, only one notable gesture (smoothing back his hair), and a voice that sounds like sand squeezing through a sieve...

...And the asylum scene, showing Nina in her ultimate decline into insanity, is an obvious bid to outdo Brook's madhouse mise en scene for Marat/Sade...

...This is supposed to be her revenge on her venal, unscrupulous parent who pushed her into prostitution, but the true victim is the viewer's stomach...

...Nina is made into a romantic schoolgirl writing swooning fan letters to famous or dashing strangers, a crazy and destructive nymphomaniac and sadomasochist, and a touching little woman heartbreakingly in love with a husband who cannot requite her ardor...

...In almost every play or film she inflicts her naked body on us, which, considering its quality, is the supreme insult flung at the spectators...

...In this thoroughly offensive sequence, Nina squats on the grating of an underground dungeon enclosing the most raving and malformed lunatics...

...the first charming, although exaggerating Delius' importance as a composer...

...The exact counterpart of this scene, by the way, can be found in Song of Norway, the current trashy mass-consumption musical about Grieg...

...Or, rather, not grown—in height, artistic stature, the ability to convey an inner life of any but the most trivial kind...

...Once again Antoine goes from peculiar job to peculiar job (here from live flower-dyer to radio manipulator of toy boats in a display pool of an American shipping firm), once again he dallies with a woman other than his true love (here a charming but wholly improbable Japanese girl), once again everything works out happily in the end...

...In the case of The Music Lovers, originally entitled Tchaikovsky, Russell has indulged himself in a freewheeling fantasy about the composer's life, using a few facts (and disregarding a great many more), a handful of rather debatable surmises, and a prodigality of out-and-out fabrications...

...tells off Tchaikovsky after the (fictitious) premiere of the First Piano Concerto, insisting that except for a bit here and there, it is no good and needs a lot of reworking...

...Scene after scene flaunts Russell's exhibitionism, his overloading every shot with stifling excess...

...Mamma, who died of the cholera and the monstrous scalding baths that were considered an effective remedy for it, is portrayed as an aging nude woman being parboiled alive...

...Chief among them, besides his scenarist, is Glenda Jackson, an actress of some talent, whose entire persona, however, is made up of contempt and even hatred for the audience...

...It may not give you lung cancer, but it shrouds human truths in a smokescreen that gets in your eyes...

...Not that there is anything tasteless here--if anything, the film is prudishly over-decorous--yet neither is there anything incisive, illuminating, new...

...The only levels on which the composer's inversion seems to concern Russell are (1) amateurish Freudianizing about how his hero got to be that way, and (2) cheap exploitation of this aberration by confronting it with the supposititious oversex-edness of Nina, the girl Tchaikovsky married and separated from 11 weeks later...

...Thus we get a typical cigarette-commercial fantasy of the composer and his sister cavorting through every kind of landscape and clime--worsened by the fact that it goes on immeasurably longer than the late cigarette commercials...

...It is possible that he actually did do something like this deliberately, but the film does not examine his motivation leading up to such an act beyond showing us yet another fantasy in which everyone he ever knew seems to be chasing after him, grabbing at him (to the tune of The 1812 Overture), and making him comment wryly on his sister's not having left him even the least memento in her will...

...The first assertion is vastly exaggerated, and the second would not follow even if the first were true...

...Cholera does not cause these festering sores, but they may occur as a side effect...

...Regrettably, Truffaut tells us as little about how one becomes, or is, an artist as Ken Russell does in his Tchaikovsky film...

...The main trouble is that Truffaut's comic vein runs thinner and thinner...