Ew, what a mess!: "The Music Lovers" (1970)

The English director Ken Russell was not one for using much restraint, and most of his films that I've seen ("Women in Love", "Tommy") display the kind of talent usually seen by children who've just gotten their first set of crayons: exuberance, and the desire to use ALL of the colors at their disposal no matter how it ends up looking.  Having just watched his 1970 musical biography of the Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky, I can add another film to that list of wildly-directed messes.  Russell indeed uses all his crayons at the same time, and what might under another director have been just a standard biographical film, becomes under him, a chaotic whirlwind of classical music, hysteria, and madness.

Richard Chamberlain plays Tchaikovsky, all intense stares and jangling nerves.  Is it because he is haunted by the childhood death of his mother, his barely restrained attraction to his close friend Count Chiluvsky (Christopher Gable, flaming it up with all the jets on his stove at full force), or his ill-conceived marriage to the nympho Nina (Glenda Jackson, who gets all into the part, making the most of her mad scenes, of which she has plenty).  The question is never fully answered, because apparently every relationship in Tchaikovsky's life is fragmented to one degree or another.  Despite his flourishes and directorial excess, Russell does manage some impressive set pieces: Peter's first performance at the conservatory, a lovely performance of "Swan Lake", and Nina's final scenes at the asylum.  Other scenes, such as a fantasy sequence involving people swarming after Peter and cannons lopping off the heads of all of his acquaintances don't come off nearly as well.

Really, the only thing I can recommend this film for is the performance of Glenda Jackson.  She was one of the most critically beloved actresses of the early 1970's, and her Nina is a good example of why: she gives herself totally to the role, abandoning all traces of vanity but not quite going all "actressy".  She's obviously unstable from the start, but the journey she takes is effective in its heaviness as well as its sadness.