The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2006)
Runtime: 1 hr 39 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, Amira Casar
DVD Info
Release:
Apr 24, 2007
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
- Anamorphic Widescreen
Audio:
- (unspecified) - English
- Subtitles - English
Additional Release Material:
- Audio Commentary
- Behind the Scenes - The Making of THE PIANO TUNER
- Interviews
- Trailers - Theatrical Trailer
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
blends live action and animation to create a surreal hermetic vision that is as beautifully seductive as it is chillingly inaccessible.
What the movie lacks in acting and coherence, it more than makes up for through imagery.
The story proves to be elusive, and the robotic performances of the cast make it hard to care about any of the characters -- or to try to figure out what's supposed to be going on.
It's one thing to make an audience sweat a bit to ferret out a plot, or piece together visual clues in order to comprehend a film. But it's quite another to dunk such richly imagined pictures in such a thick coat of shadow.
It's a hauntingly effective, poetic mood piece but an exasperating drama.
It is a bold step into a mainstream realm for its ancient fablelike theme, agile storytelling, magnificent design and sure grasp of long-form narrative structure.
The Quay brothers have created a gloriously gorgeous filmwith wondrous set pieces that have been beautifully shot inburnished tones by cinematographer Nic Knowland. It's a dark and disturbing fairy tale that fans of the brothers' work will embrace.
This opaque tale offers meticulously crafted atmosphere, but rather less passion or drama.
As in most of the Quays' fantasias, the narrative is oblique and slow moving but the florid visuals are rife with sexual and psychological overtones.
Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.
Exquisitely detailed, difficult to grasp hold of, and always obscured by molds and corrosions. The Quay Brothers are distinct oddities in the landscape of contemporary cinema.
Characters slowly whisper their dialogue to one another in scenes that would put the dead to sleep.
The whole movie feels filmed through the wrong end of a stereopticon: stiff, fascinating, riddled with secrets it doesn't care to divulge.
The music is gorgeously classical and some of the images are memorable and haunting, but experiencing the film is near-torture.
... those who can surrender to the Quays' poetic logic will find "The Piano Tuner" to be nothing short of a masterpiece.
However much The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes wants to haunt your dreams, it has a better chance of production-designing you to death.
What if David Lynch had directed The Abominable Dr. Phibes? The result might well have been something along the lines of this Quay Brothers horror art film.
'The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes' is a semi-animated, human-acted fantasy that plays sweetly but takes too long to say too little.
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