ArnoldReview: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: ** 1/2
Dir: The Quay Brothers
The credits rolled and I sat staring, the afterimage of a burning white face and bench buried in the snow still resonating in my eyes, the final image of the film. I wasn't sure if I was blown away, confused, enraged or all three.
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is riddled with problems: the unnecessarily overbearing voice-over exposition during the first forty minutes, the thin plot lines in the opening five minutes. The Quay Brothers seem to not be entirely sure what this film is about, I don't get the sense that there was a mastermind behind this warped world, like a viewer may while watching another film with an inentionally confusing plotline. (See Svankmajer's 'Faust,' Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive,' 'A Tale of Two Sisters,' etc. etc. except there is somee concept that works in these). In the opening a mysterious doctor has an opera singer murdered on stage in front of her husband, the day before their wedding. The doctor then takes her into what is essentially a tornado of water, somewhere, whispers to her, and she breathes again. I'm not sure that it actually makes any more sense than that description does, but there it is. And so it goes. For nearly two hours.
That said, it is an interesting, if not convoluted, film and, if for no better reason, see it because it is horribly beautiful. The dried color palette, the hazy, dream-like quality of the main character's POV and the stop motion animation all combine to create a film rich in texture and beauty. It seems that The Brothers Quay, though maybe not the most
talented of writers (this, I believe, is only their second feature length as compared to stacks of rich short films), they are certainly masters of the medium visually. It's an intense, droning, paced film. It's slow and garbled. But it's beautiful. If that for any reason intrigues you, then you should see it. Shold headaches occur while reading the description of this film then they'll probably occur during as well.
