MOSCOW — When it finally appeared during a prerelease screening Tuesday night in Moscow, one of the most hotly anticipated scenes in Russian cinema this year elicited not gasps of alarm, as critics had suggested it would, but instead a few giggles.
In the scene, a ballerina exposes her breast to the young Nicholas II, who was to become the last czar of Russia, during a performance on the stage of St. Petersburg’s storied Mariinsky Theater.
It was said to have been an accidental loosening of her leotard. But as the movie, “Matilda,” chronicles, this was no inconsequential wardrobe malfunction, but one that led to a love affair between the future czar and the ballerina, Matilda Kshesinskaya.
The problem today is that the Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas II in 2000: Many Orthodox Christians consider the scene, and the suggestion of a premarital affair by the czar, offensive to the point of being heretical.
As a result, the movie has been met with threats, arson attacks on theaters and calls for a ban. The police briefly detained seven activists outside the Oktyabr movie theater Tuesday evening, the news agency Tass reported, and the movie’s distributor has requested police protection for its nationwide opening on Thursday and over the weekend.
However, most Russians — and certainly those at the screening in Moscow on Tuesday — take little or no offense at a bit of nudity in a period costume drama.
“The famous scene, in which Matilda Kshesinskaya exposes her breast right on the stage of the imperial theater, brought on not trembling but some quiet laughter,” wrote Gazeta.ru, a news website. “It shows, it seems, just how far contemporary Russia is from the epoch” of the czars.
And yet, in recent years, the government of President Vladimir V. Putin has all but enshrined conservative Orthodox Christianity as a state ideology and has deferred to the church on cultural matters, setting up a tug-of-war over the movie’s release.
The release of trailers earlier this year was enough to prompt arson attacks on a movie theater in Yekaterinburg and on two cars outside the Moscow office of a lawyer representing Aleksei Uchitel, the movie’s director. The German actor who played Nicholas II, Lars Eidinger, and the Polish actress playing Ms. Kshesinskaya, Michalina Olszanska, declined to attend the premiere in Russia out of concern for their safety.
At the screening on Tuesday, opponents stood with icons and portraits of Nicholas II, and some recited prayers. One woman held a sign saying, “Matilda slanders the anointed.”
One bearded protester tried to hand one of the film’s actors, Yevgeny Mironov, coins representing the 30 pieces of silver that Judas was paid to betray Jesus, Gazeta.ru reported.
The groups protesting included the Czar’s Cross and Forty Forties, the latter a reference to the prominence of religion and the abundance of church onion domes in medieval Moscow (there were said to be 1,600 of them, 40 times 40).
At the showing on Monday in St. Petersburg, at the same Mariinsky Theater where much of the movie’s plot unfolded, two dozen or so Orthodox activists and monarchists stood outside holding posters saying, “Hands off the Russian Czar” and “The Czar Will Return and Put Things in Order.”
On the other side of this Russian cultural chasm, three young anticlerical activists also showed up holding a sign saying, “We Will Rescue You From Orthodox Terrorists.”
In fact, the authorities have taken a step to quell the protests by arresting the leader of a group that had threatened violence over the film, the Christian State, suggesting that in this instance pro-Orthodox activists had gone too far, even by Kremlin standards.
Source: nytimes
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