“The costume drama featuring this moment, a film called Matilda after the dancer, is not due out until October. Yet the release of trailers of that scene, and a few others depicting the torrid affair that follows, was enough to ignite a firestorm.” The opposing sides are “an artistic community determined to fend off any hint of Soviet-style censorship” and a religious nationalist faction that sees the film as an insult to Nicholas II (the crown prince in question) – and therefore, since the last tsar is now a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church, “an insult to the faithful, which is a crime in Russia.”