Review of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005) by François M — 23 Aug 2007

A lifeless visual enigma. I first heard of this film when I went to see Lynch's Inland Empire in Cleveland. It looked to be in a similar vein to much of Lynch's material. The trailer seemed to portray his sort of strange, highly (if at first sight incomprehensibly) mechanized, and, most of all, ominous world, where psychological phantoms run as rampant in reality as they do in dreams.

When I finally got around to seeing this film, I was sorely disappointed. Not immediately, mind you. Before the 'piano tuner' appeared, the film was rather satisfying, if only because it seemed that the film could open up from there into some interesting psychological mysteries.

But it didn't. The viewer who would call the film 'incoherent' has not watched it carefully enough. But that mistaken viewer cannot be blamed, because the film, though not incoherent or incomprehensible, is quite uninteresting.

Where it could have used its bizarre world to give reinforcing physical expression to the driving psychologies of the characters, it instead makes itself vehicle to characters so vacuous and wooden that it is difficult to believe they have motivations at all, let alone psychologies.

Something so-called 'art house' films--including this one--often display is a bizarre aversion to strong emotion. It's almost as if their makers believe that to be emotional is to be unintelligent, so they avoid, as far as possible, truly emotional performances and events while still claiming to deal with important emotional issues.

Truly great film makers--and Lynch is most certainly among them--are not afraid to explicitly introduce emotion into their films. And were 'art house' films not so wooden and lifeless, it would not surprise me if the sharp line between 'popular' and 'artistic' films either disappeared completely or blurred almost beyond identification.