The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes

The Quays’ long-awaited follow-up to their wonderful debut feature 'Institute Benjamenta' is as imaginative and visually seductive as one might expect. Again live action is combined with puppet animation in the story of a beautiful opera singer (Casar) abducted during a performance by the sinister Dr Droz (John), who whisks her off to his remote tropical island, where the titular tuner (Sarachu) is hired to adjust the machinery of seven automata… In other words, it's a weird fairy tale, a Gothic fable of obsessive desire, magical expertise and bizarre coincidence that owes at least as much to painting and literature as to cinema. The pace, wholly in keeping with the hothouse setting in which the delectable damsel's kept, perhaps tends a little too much to the languid, and Sarachu's performance doesn't reaslly work, but for those who like their movies different, ambitious and luscious to look at, there's much here to enjoy.