Piano Tuner

Kira Muratova's 2004 "Piano Tuner" confirms my suspicion that this Ukrainian director is the most innovative and baffling film maker alive. Notice: I don't say that she is the best director in the world, nor do I claim that she makes the most entertaining or profound or intelligent films. My claim is simply that her pictures seem to me to be utterly unique, the product of an idiosyncratic sensibility unlike anyone else. "Piano Tuner" aka "Tuner" is a "sting" picture -- that is, the movie belongs to the genre of films about con-men laying the foundation for, and, then, implementing some form of cunning criminal fraud. Saying that the 158 minute "Piano Tuner," is a "sting" picture, however, is like saying "Crime and Punishment" is a detective novel. The movie is huge, fantastically loquacious, and utterly perverse. Two women, Lyuba and Anna Sergeteeva occupy an apartment crammed with expensive knick-knacks and musical instruments. Anna is a handsome widow in her early sixties. (But she may be a drug addict; one of Lyuba's functions is to administer injections into her hip.) Anna has a mewling, whining little Pekinese, Mikki, with bug eyes that she carries everywhere with her. Lyuba is about ten years younger, a plump and love-starved woman who posts personal ads in the newspapers to meet men. Most heist films feature a group of attractive grifters scheming to separate some much less attractive and ruthless criminals from their ill-gotten gains. In "Piano Tuner," these two nice and sympathetic older women are the target of the grift and, certainly, the viewer can't see anything about them, other than their generosity and exuberance, that justifies the confidence men (in this case a man and woman) selecting them as victims. The grifters are a piano tuner, a fellow with exceptionally mobile and expressive features, and his consort, a mysterious blonde woman who seems to have some sort of mythic and allegorical status. The tuner and the blonde live in a bizarre storage attic accessed by a vertical ladder rising about the top of a vertiginous elliptical stairway in a strange stark white silo-shaped building. The flat has no running water and seems to be scorching hot -- fans run all the time and the decor is wicker cages that diffract the sunlight into moire patterns (the film is beautifully shot in black and white), mannequins -- we see something like looks like a squat voodoo-doll version of Lyuba -- chess boards, and other arcane objects. In one scene, the blonde woman appears as the figure of death wielding a great scythe. In other images, she sits among rocks on a sea-shore like a stranded mermaid or stares with unsettling candor at the camera. The piano tuner develops an elaborate strategy to convince the women that they have won a lottery prize -- apparently, Russian banks encourage deposits and saving by offering lotteries based upon the numbers on Certificate of Deposit accounts (at least this is how I construe the framework for the "sting" plot.) The "sting" requires printing a fake page in a Russian Yellow Pages phone directory, retaining other criminals to answer the phone and pretend to be bankers and a variety of other complicated and recondite maneuvers. At the end of the movie, after the women have been deprived of their savings, we see them riding a street car crammed with Muratova's trade-mark zanies. The older woman forgives the piano tuner his perfidy, noting that grifter claimed that his father was an alcoholic and that the con-man told them he had suffered a difficult life. Then, she makes an interesting observation: "They could have just robbed us and avoided all of this plotting." And, of course, that is completely true -- the con man piano tuner ingratiated himself with the elderly ladies to the extent that they would have simply given him the money had he asked and, certainly, he had complete access to their apartment and a summer-house crammed with valuables. This remark puts into question the entire complicated plot of the movie. The sting or con is so immensely complex, so hypertrophic and over-developed that it suggests that the grift is some sort of performance art, some kind of exercise for its own sake. The grift exists to place the women in contact with the piano tuner and his sinister mistress. The ultimate outcome of the machinations seems unimportant; rather, the film is about the construction of a bizarre phantasmagoric narrative, a dream-like novelistic accretion of peculiar details that is completely excessive to any plot necessity. My son, Jack, with whom I watched the film, unlocked its theme, I think, with an astute observation: in one scene, the piano tuner is playing a piano and grimacing (as well as winking) grotesquely toward the camera. I wondered: is he performing these elaborate grimaces for Mikki, the pekinese? Jack answered that he interpreted the character as looking directly into the camera and inviting us to understand that the entire performance was for the film audience and that the movie was, itself, a con -- that, in fact, all art is a species of fraud, the perpetuation of a lie, not necessarily for an ulterior motive, but for its own sake. I think this interpretation makes sense of many aspects of the film: someone coments that piano players are always embarrassing because of the masturbatory grimaces that they produce to dramatize the music they are producing. Muratova populates her images with Brueghel-like grotesques and she seems to have one rule that she applies to directing her extras -- make faces and contort your body into weird postures to try to distract the viewer from the principal action in the foreground. Every minor character in the film seems engaged in acting-out some private, intensely melodramatic opera scene -- everyone dances and prances around, gesticulates wildly, and hams it up for the camera; there is a distinct amateur film, Super 8 feel about some of the scenes. When the grifter goes to buy cups for a musical soiree that the elderly ladies are going to host, the sales lady, who has an immense mouth like a frog, scowls and gurns at the camera as if trying to make the most grotesque faces possible. Everyone, it seems, is acting, posturing, scheming to perpetuate some form of fraud. Lyuba meets two men, one of whom she marries on a whim. Both steal her money. In the case of the man she marries, we see her setting out the old gent's slippers in their sleeper-car on a train during their honeymoon. Outside the window, a mob of people are crowding around the train waving stuffed animals like the banners of the revolution. Lyuba's elderly husband says that he wants to buy her a stuffed hippopotamus, departs, and, then, apparently, absconds with her money. The grifters, inexplicably, hunt the husband down and, in a film projection booth, threaten him with a gun to retrieve Lyuba's cash -- presumably so that they can steal it themselves. The sinister femme fatalle proclaims: "film is the most important art -- Lenin said that", reaffirming, I think the theme that art itself is a form of confidence game. Some of this can be interpreted but other aspects of the movie seem impenetrable to me -- possibly because Muratove is "freely adapting" several short stories (as per the credits) that don't really fit together. The tuner's girlfriend prattles on and on about a female pope and seems blood-thirsty. She talks about the "hand of God" and wants to avenge fetuses killed by abortion -- she accuses the elderly woman who has no children of having "at least thirty abortions." And she says that she has had three abortions in the last couple years herself just with her current boyfriend, the tuner. In one scene, we see a fat woman digging in a garbage can. We can't figure out where she is located or how she relates to the story. Ultimately, the film produces a reverse-angle, and we observe that the fat woman is being watched by the sinister blonde. The blonde invites the fat woman to sit at her table at an expensive cafe and pours her glass after glass of wine. the fat woman proudly shows the blonde "green stripes" in her blouse, but, of course, we can't see those colors since the film is shot in black-and-white. But the blonde can't see those colors either -- she says: "So on top of all your problems, you're color-blind too." In another scene, Lyuba leans forward to light her husband's cigarette. She hands him the thin, elegant-looking lighter but the husband mistakes it for a cell-phone. He puts it to his ear. "No dear," Lyuba says, "it's a cigarette-lighter." But, as she lights his cigarette, the damned thing repeatedly rings like a phone. In the climax in the bank, an elderly banker, like a cross between Walter Brennan and Andy Devine, whines in a high-pitched voice. On the wall of the bank, there is a big poster that says "No Dogs" with a picture of Mikki under that legend. The old curmudgeon whines and squeals with indignation, screwing up his face into a cartoon caricature while next to him a sleazy, if handsome, young man with lacquered black hair -- he looks like a 30's tango instructor -- looks on impassively. Then, suddenly, the film cuts to a pair of beautiful, Asiatic-looking twins. The elderly woman, who have been defrauded, are thrown out of the bank. As they leave, another set of dowdy middle-aged twins walks into the place. All of this is astounding and incomprehensible. Groping for comparisons, I initially wrote that Muratova's film, with its bizarre players, characters draped in feathers and fur, two homosexuals wearing matching Marilyn Monroe tee-shirts and camping-it-up for the camera, its operatic mise-en-scene, and torrents of semi-hysterical dialogue, its dislocated camera syntax (you can never tell where you are or why), its odd and distracting musical cues, all of these factors, I wrote reminded me a of a Werner Schroeter film. But I decided not to use that comparison. I have never scene a Werner Schroeter film, but only imagined them. You can't get DVDs of Schroeter's pictures in the United States and his movies have never played commercially in any theater.