Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is the second full-length live-action film from the Quay brothers, a pair of identical twins better known for their weird, stop-motion animated shorts like The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb. And, judging by the outcome of this cumbersomely titled film, it might have been better if they had stuck to those.

The plot has something to do with a beautiful opera singer, a piano tuner who looks like Lou Reed, and some kind of doctor who runs a mental institution with bizarre music-creating automatons who steal people’s souls or life energy. The fact that everyone in the movie whispers the entire time and speaks in annoying, cryptic and old-timey phrases makes it essentially impossible to figure out what’s happening.

Piano Tuner is ostensibly a mystery, but the only conclusions I came to were: What the fuck’s going on? Why did I pay $9 for this boring movie and an overpriced beer? I had as much idea what was happening five minutes in as I did at the end. Probably more.

I’ve heard a lot of hoopla about the high quality of the visuals. I have to admit that much of the design in the film was inspired and showed a definite vision. The brothers Quay surely intended to create a fantastical, diabolical world for their characters to inhabit, and they largely succeeded. Most of the setting is more or less a lift from old German Expressionist films, but credit must be given for the grotesque automatons with rotten human teeth or a pair of disembodied hands rowing a boat, as they could potentially form the backdrop for a chilling or at least unsettling narrative. But then, some crappy sepia tone filter gets laid over everything and the dynamism of the sets becomes about as boring as the rest of the movie.

Under this oppressive blanket of non-color, characters falter and die in an overly esoteric world of art-house bullshit. Only the titular piano tuner, Felisberto, can be related to in the most superficial of ways, and his diary-entry voiceovers also give the only hints as to how the story is developing. The mad doctor, which one would think couldn’t help but be interesting, is about as interesting as my empty beer cup and as disappointing too. I can’t even tell if they acted well, since they were as melodramatic as the most inexperienced school actor. This ends up killing the movie, as people can’t be expected to sit through 99 minutes of visual fluff without some kind of human connection.

Sit through it you will, as the thing seems like it is about eight hours long, dragging on and on, passing the point of being a boring art film and becoming the most boring movie in history.

About the only things that woke me from my catatonia were the bizarre, random instances of sexual imagery, one being a straight-out charcoal drawing of a vagina labeled “larynx” and the other being a dick-shaped automaton thrusting in and out of a bird’s nest. I don’t even know what the fuck those things meant. They certainly didn’t fit in with anything else in the movie, or any kind of sexual theme I could discern. They were just kind of there, like the audience members who foolishly wasted their Saturday night watching this piece of shit. So, unless you’re some kind of high-class Joe who loves being confused in the name of art, leave this one alone. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.