The Brothers Quay

To Mark Dansereau, 4/25/06

I just got back from a Filmfest DC movie with friends Tom + Christie. I badgered them into seeing a Quay Brothers film -- the Quays are proteges of the fabulous Czech animator Jan Svankmajer (Faust, Alice, Little Otek). Like Svankmajer they do these very paintaking stop-action films, as well as the occasional music video, and while their shorts achieve a much more eerie, wordless, transcendent effect with their spinning objects and doll-heads than Svanmakjer aspires to, they have little of his visual humor. The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, their first feature-length film in several years, is mostly live action and (unfortunately) only has bits of their characteristic animation, where bits of string fly through the air and wrap themselves around twirling wooden figures. The film was highly atmospheric, fever-dreamy and excquisitely designed: instead of a location, I think they built a soundstage for scenes set in a birch forest by the seaside. The story has some gothic-horror elements: a creepy "doctor" (.... as in Dr. Caligari?) covets a beautiful opera singer and abducts her after she suddenly collapses dead at her wedding, then brings her back to life in his remote island sanctuary, where he's built several Rube Goldberg-y mechanical display-boxes he calls "automatons," employs a group of dancing gardeners, and keeps a sinister, smiling woman-in-black around for company. A piano tuner is summoned to adjust the automaton boxes, and he serves as our point of view; he falls in love with the zombified soprano, who wears a back veil, stares out at the waves (which we rarely see, only hear) and pines for her lost groom. Ultimately we see that the obsessed Dr. Dros has a grand plan for achieving some sort of immortality by staging a concert where zombie-lady will sing "my music."

In the end, a long tentacle bursts out of his forehead and sprays a mist of mold spores everywhere.

The film is partly based on Jules Verne's 1892 gothic novella The Carpathian Castle. After the first 10 minutes it's exceedingly cryptic and glacially paced, filled with odd sleepwalky line readings rendered in deeply accented English by actors of several nationalities. Almost more allegorical than real, like Guy Maddin's stagey films are sometimes, and while it conjured an other-worldly atmosphere, I often got frustrated with the relentlessly surreal dialogue and general obscurity of the events. While watching it I was remembering the Quays' last live-action feature, Institute Benjamenta from 1996 I think, and how I'd been similarly disappointed then by their odd scripting, their apparent lack of touch for actors' performances and their insistence on sacrificing comprehensibility to mood and design (sets, models, shadowy lighting and focus, sound effects, and a color-drained palette that betrays how they seem to prefer working in black-and-white). I think all in all they're better in the short pieces than long-form.

"Piano Tuner" capsule at Filmfest site:
http://www.cdad.com/tuan/filmfest/filmView.cfm?passID=46&CFID=283181&CFTOKEN=98717400

Quay Brothers' site: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/directors/tbrothers/