Adelaide Film Festival review: The Piano Tuner
Modern life has meant once-prized pianos are going out of fashion, left to warp in the sun and become habitat for termites. A new Australian documentary follows one man who isn’t giving up on them.
Every year in Australia, 250,000 pianos are discarded. As people make way for electric keyboards – our trusted churches included – those old uprights, like yesteryear’s typewriters, are now endangered, possibly to the point of extinction. Is it fair to lend such anthropomorphic terminology to an instrument made of wood and metal strings? The correct course of action here would be to point you to a musician, who might argue their case, or to point you to The Piano Tuner, a quietly vibrant and serious yet feelgood documentary screening at the Adelaide Film Festival.
Tasmanian piano tuner Martin Tucker is The Piano Doctor, who doesn’t mind an occasional barter – a bag of vegetables, perhaps – for his work. He travels around the coast and into the bush of our southernmost state with his ‘box of bits’ and emergency set of strings, navigating mice droppings and saving the untuned-est of the untuned. In the winter he travels north, his annual road trip to Darwin connecting him with the clients whose families are both growing and dying away. No matter where he is, his regulars invite him to jam with them, to share meals, to feed animals and hold babies.
For the Polish Australian and former journalist Natalia Laska, culture and identity are touchstones in her debut documentary. She followed Tucker around for eight years, visiting some of the most remote homesteads in the most beautiful country. In this way, The Piano Tuner can be viewed as a road-trip movie, with music and friendship at its heart. Tucker is fascinated by the acoustics of a space and so much by the tonality of a piano that he sometimes prefers the out-of-tuned because it might match its bush surroundings, coming closest to the birdsong of the setting or the sound of a nearby stream.
You might like
He seems to have an intimate understanding of his patrons’ surrounds and is most comfortable nurturing longtime relationships through the mutual love of music. One woman is as close to an aunty as he’s ever been, and they waltz. With another, he sings a duet – an old Malaysian song from her homeland.
It’s touching to watch him connect with these people through an instrument that’s – quite bafflingly – going out of style, and it’s moving to spend an hour and a half with someone whose work is filled with such genuine purpose that he must worry who will take the reins when he’s gone, and we then wonder who will inherit his box of bits. Unsurprisingly, The Piano Tuner was awarded Runner-up Audience Award at this year’s Sydney Film Festival.
It already feels to be an Australian classic.
The Piano Tuner screens again on Sunday October 25 as part of Adelaide Film Festival
Want to see more stories from InDaily SA in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily SA as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily SA". That's it.
Free to share
This article may be shared online or in print under a Creative Commons licence