The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
Starring: Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, Cesar Sarachu
Director: The Quay brothers (Stephen and Timothy)
The film: The last major outing for British-Kurdish actor Amira Casar was in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell, in which her character hires a man to watch her spiral into depravity. On the level of bared flesh and desire, Casar's latest work, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, is on the polar opposite: a dark fantasy set in a dreamy, soft-focus landscape.
This tale of an abducted opera singer living in a bizarre world of deranged patients and outlandish automata is told with physical and emotional intimacy kept to a minimum.
That isn't to say that Piano Tuner lacks sexual frisson. As in their previous work - such as Institute Benjamenta, which revolves around a young man's trapped desires in a servants' training school - or Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence, the Quay brothers spice up a seemingly innocuous narrative with a simmering menace. The threat of violence and debauchery emerges in sporadic spurts of suggestive imagery, such as phallic objects and ambivalent movements of the machines devised by the mad abductor Dr Emmanuel Droz (Gottfried John).