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.