L'accordeur de tremblements de terre

Dark and textured. This is a adult parable/fairytale about Love & death steeped in victorian-age clockwork magic. The scenes rendered in almost antique "stop Action" animation has an eldritch/creepy feel to it that keeps the viewer on the edge of feeling like he was watching someone's beginning nightmare, or a fever dream on the verge of going very wrong.

For those of you who care-- Although the story never crosses the line: there is a light stream of dark eroticism running through this movie-- so ADULTS ONLY, folks! This movie is NOT FOR KIDS. Mind you, it is tastefully done, whatever your morals.

The storyline is. . .obscure yet evocative. It echoes of something I can't quite pin down I won't repeat what others have said except for the Main Reason for the entire Adventure. An Beautiful Opera Singer dies, and is brought to the weird clockwork isle of Dr. Droz to be magically revived as part of his clockwork art/machines.

This isn't a Storyline or a Plot, really, it's a description of what you start with. What the STORY in this movie is ACTUALLY about is still hard to wrap my mind around-- except that it's deeply woven in the characters and the soft, twisty, multi-meaningful dialogue about Desire and Death.

Having said that, I never once hit the FF button, and I PAUSED the DVD when I had to leave for a moment.

This movie is more aptly a literary event for the eyes and the mind. Best viewed with the lights and cellphones OFF. Gag the Girlfriend for good measure while you're at it. I don't expect her to pass this test.

Every single appearance in this magical world pretends to have a meaning. Maybe it has, maybe not, that makes no difference. It's just a dependency, an intimate relation which chains you at the screen, forgiving you, still busy in wondering who and why... it embraces you in a cozy fake world, more real than any realistic projection. The discounted love story plot is just a background for the astonishing images and sounds, artificial and natural visions, insane but familiar feelings which make this hours pregnant. Erotism is driving the puppets (aka all of them, the characters) straight into their toy alcove, still standing on the edge of perversion and passion. You'll love these dropped confetti, if you're in a receptive state of mind.

What an amazing movie - so strange, so romantic, so beautiful, so different, so dreamy, so delicate, so imaginative. This is a film that should be seen if only because it is one of the most beautifully shot films of the last several years. Praised to the high heaven "Pan's Labyrinth" simply pales and disappears in comparison. The Brothers Quay are the visual masters with astounding talents for capturing dreams and transferring them to the screen in the most hypnotizing ways imaginable. We may not be able to always understand the meaning of a dream by trying to interpret its objects but it would not stop us from feeling the beauty and magic of the film. There is a story of course, a fairytale about an evil doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with a magnificent voice whom he wants to transform into a mechanical singing device and a piano tuner of earthquakes who falls in love with her and tries to save her but every image and every sound of the movie are the story themselves. Everyone who feels at home in the worlds of David Lynch or Peter Greenaway, Luis Bunuel or Jan Svankmajer, Guy Maddin or the Brothers Polish; who is impressed by Georges Franju's "Les Yeux sans visage", Jean Cocteau's "Belle et la bête" (1946), by both Patrick Susskind's and Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006), and by dark romantic fairy tales of E.T. A. Hoffmann, should see and listen to "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes", the film which charm starts with its title.

Excellent , and according to my own grading system, a visual and sound masterpiece, I wish I'd seen it in the theater

PTOE is a sumptuous, seven course feast for the senses.

Nic Knowland's HD cinematography is wonderfully rich and textural. The sound design is eerie and extremely effective.

The art direction is equally fantastic.

Amira Cesar is endowed with an ethereal, otherworldly beauty and is perfectly cast in the film. As is Gottfried John who delights as the diabolical Dr. Droz.

The Quays have succeeded yet again in creating a strangely compelling parallel universe, falling somewhere between German Expressionism and Kafkaesque Surrealism.

The twins have generally been tagged as image-makers rather than story-tellers. That is not necessarily true, as each picture says a thousand words.

If you approach PTOE on a purely sensory level - you will be in for a spellbinding ride in which time will cease to exist. If you approach it as a conventional narrative, you will instead find yourself looking constantly at your watch.

Alice or the white rabbit - it's really your choice.

There are some writers (Kafka, Haruki Murakami), some musicians (Monk, Trane, Beethoven), some artists (Max Ernst) and some directors (The Brothers Quay and possibly David Lynch) whose work never disappoints me.

I don't care if a movie makes sense or not. In fact, I prefer dream logic to real logic (forget about Hollywood logic!). The Piano Tuner draws you into a world you cannot forget. The alternately subtle and dramatic lighting choices the directors/cinematographers made were compelling.

The fact that the protagonist looks a bit like Kafka and has a similar predeliction for dreams and a similar love life happened to resonate for me.

True surrealism did not die out in the Thirties, but what passes for surrealism these days is generally anything that is "weird" or "fantastical." The Brothers Quay have put together a movie that the classic surrealists (and today's surrealists!) would have loved is an accomplishment of which the Brothers Quay should be proud.

Any movie that changes the way I look at the world when I walk out of theater rates ten quivering mechanical thumbs up for me.