On the eve of her wedding, the beautiful Malvina, an opera singer, is murdered on stage, in front of an audience. The disturbing Doctor Droz takes possession of the body and takes it to his strange and gigantic home on the ocean shore, where he builds musical robots. To take care of his creations, Droz summons Felisberto, a piano tuner. Guided by a seductive and maternal landlady, the latter, candid and tender, discovers with surprise the reason for his visit and the doctor's universe: the servants, the woods, the sea, the robots, everything seems strange to him, shrouded in mystery. Every evening the tuner hears a fascinating song whose origin he cannot determine. Determined to penetrate its mystery, he follows the voice and furtively meets Malvina, whom the doctor has brought back to life. During a walk, he finds her on a bench facing the sea; she seems absent, speaks little, and little by little Felisberto understands that Droz wants to make her the highlight of a diabolical work, staging her alongside robots. Touched by the woman's beauty and fragility, the tuner decides to work to free her.
source
www.mymovies.it
Critics
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is full of literary fascination and clear fairy-tale atmospheres, where the grotesque, the candor and the disenchantment mix in the descriptions of contradictory humanity. The Quays move in a phantasmagorical universe that recalls the contrasts of lights of romantic art and expressionism, populated by automatons, tuners-lovers, mad professors, resurrected deaths, sensual and maternal landladies. It seems like being in one of the stories of the great Bruno Schulz or following the delicate drifts of the characters of Robert Walser, who the two brothers have often drawn inspiration from. The name of Professor Droz, the delirious master of the metaphorical island where everything takes place, brings to mind the dear old charlatan of Oz and his madness, his delirium of omnipotence, still hark back to the great Zardoz, with his immortals forced into cyclical boredom as if they were wonderful music box automatons, just like the characters in this film. Then there is all the gothic and horror imagery of the mad professor who wants to control nature, or the unexpressed and restrained sensuality of the divine Barbara Steele, and again we find the myth of Orpheus with a splendid Euridice/Judy Garland, with very white skin and heartbreaking singing.
Time, cyclicality, madness, nature, mystery, candor, deception, take shape in a story of mechanical bodies, those of the automatons that steal soul and liquids from natural bodies, both alive, still pulsating like Felisberto the piano tuner summoned for an absurd task, and dead, like the singer Malvina. And again, the theme of the double (Felisberto is the double of Malvina's fiancé), of condemnation, of damnation, everything refers to nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature. The beloved puppets, animated by the Quays in dozens of short films, in their interaction with living beings mix the cards on the table, interrupt the cyclicality of the catastrophic music boxes in which they are relegated, they even bleed, they live and die, a bit demonic creatures and a bit victims of their own destiny. And if the puppets come to life, the men, Felisberto Malvina Droz, lose their souls inside bodies forced to become new natural music box automatons, and eternally repeat the moment before love.
The Quays' ability to move from science fiction to gothic, from Bava to Jess Franco via Jack Arnold, is remarkable, building a world that follows the not very strict rules of the impossible fairy tale, of the grotesque, without ever falling into hyperbole and with a sense of measure and dosage of the parts always balanced, like perfect orchestra conductors who handle disparate materials and languages. The photography is often high contrast, at times expressionist, sometimes soft and dreamlike, and alternates a coppery brown in the woods with a faded and icy blue of the afterlife in the scenes on the cliff, with a very dark blue with sudden flashes of spot lights in the opera house, with an impressionist sunset red. The characters’ faces often have a soft focus that takes them far away into the fable, the nightmare, the dream, the metaphor. Everything is perfectly functional, everything lives off the other, everything contributes to defining a world of the drift of the self. It is no longer the time of Svankmajer’s toilets, for the two American twins nationalized as English: the emancipation from the master has arrived for some time now. Their cinema is ambitious and anachronistic, in the true sense of the term, and this is what makes them truly unique in the panorama of contemporary cinema. The Quays have elaborated elements from different sources and times and have built their own strong and recognizable imagery, their own island of Droz where the impossible, at least there, happens.
(Eugenio Barzaghi)
