The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes Movie Review:


For their second feature, the Quay Brothers use real actors and full-scale sets to recreate their grainy puppet aesthetic. It's a surreal experience, maddeningly incomprehensible and dull, but with an evocative beauty.

Malvina (Cesar) is a young opera singer set to marry her beloved Adolfo (Saracho), but at the wedding the sinister Dr Droz (John) kills and then kidnaps her. In his isolated mountain lair, he revives her and plans to stage a cataclysmic opera with her and his seven mechanical tableaux, which the piano tuner Felisberto (Saracho again) is getting into shape. But Felisberto falls for Malvina, and with the help of Droz's housekeeper (Serna), develops a plan to rescue her.

The film looks amazing--dark and shadowy, playing with light and mirrors, investing a lush, old world elegance to the grey and grim settings. It looks and feels like a cross between a Guy Madden movie and one of those creepy-sad puppet shows in Being John Malkovich. Except that the Quay Brothers neglect to include any wit or humour. As a result, it feels self-indulgent and almost painfully dreary, like an exercise in pure artistry and tone, without any consideration for the audience's need to connect with the story or characters.

Performances are almost irrelevant, as actors are used merely as figures by the directors. They do add a level of pathos; Saracho manages to inject some curiosity and optimism to counter everyone else's melancholy. But it's all so heavily stylised that there's no one we can really identify with, and no energy at all. Much of the sparse dialog consists of pretentious cliches and ponderous poetry that can't mean much to anyone beyond the Quays.

The plot is structured in a series of blackout scenes without any sensible transitions between them. As a feature film, it's clunky, draggy and uneven, and it only keeps us awake due to the otherworldly beauty of the virtually colourless design. And as the story mixes Svengali, Faust and the Phantom of the Opera into an eerily subdued tale, there's also something primeval that grabs our interest, even if we never feel an emotional punch.



Rich Cline

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