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Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson star in this 'story of a homosexual who married a nymphomaniac' It's both flamboyant and breathtakingly beautiful, says Julian Upton.

A flamboyant account of Tchaikovsky’s turbulent life (played here by Richard Chamberlain), The Music Lovers was the film that really announced Ken Russell as British cinema’s enfant terrible; critics impressed by the previous year’s Women in Love quickly learned not to take such relative restraint for granted. But today — Glenda Jackson’s delirious naked tumble in a train carriage notwithstanding — this 'story of a homosexual who married a nymphomaniac', as it was billed, might only shock classical music extremists and women who still fancy their chances with Dr. Kildare.

Instead, it is a grandiose, often breathtakingly beautiful big-screen summation of what until then had been Russell’s television oeuvre: films that celebrated the lives of composers with passion over intellect and pictures over words. The bipolar passages that visualise Tchaikovsky’s ‘greatest hits’ may have dismayed critics who believed ‘serious’ biopics demanded control and reverence, but these flourishes still dazzle after forty years. Long unavailable, it’s great to have The Music Lovers back in all its widescreen glory.

 

Julian Upton on 24th May 2011
View all 136 of Julian Upton's reviews