Daniel Roher | First Impressions

Lovely to see Dustin Hoffman on a big screen again in TUNER, almost 60 years after THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967), and still bringing life, energy and intelligence to every moment he’s in. His scenes with Leo Woodall are reason enough to see the film. Hoffman, as an elderly piano tuner (Harry Horowitz), crackles, teases, loses the thread of his conversation, falls asleep in mid reminiscence. Woodall, as his orphaned apprentice (Niki White), says next to nothing, listens, humours him, ignores him, does his job, looks at him adoringly with those round puppy eyes of his. The film is smart about letting Woodall have the screentime necessary to respond to Hoffman, without dialogue but facially and physically, to show how at ease and loving they are together. It’s a wonderful portrait of intergenerational affection, which would feel out of place in what turns out to be heist film if it weren’t one of its central pleasures and narrative drives.

TUNER is a high concept film: NIki suffers from hyperacusis, a condition that makes his hearing so sensitive it’s destroyed his career as a piano virtuoso but which also means he can open any safe by hearing alone. When Harry falls ill and the bills piles up, Niki goes to work for some Israeli gangsters. The problem with the film is that it can’t quite decide on its genre, so we also get a comedy (there’s a running gag about rich clients treating the tuners as all-purpose handymen and asking them to fix everything from wifi to plumbing while ‘they’re at it’); The film is also a romance (Havana Rose Liu is the student composer who Woodall falls for) and a heist film; all pleasurable on their own.

TUNER also has really interesting overall commentary on Jewish culture with Jean Reno as the composer in search of the watches left by his grandparents killed in the Holocaust, the shiva for Dustin Hoffman’s character, the casting of Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman’s wife – ie part of a history; the warmth and humanity of Hoffman and Feldshuh within a particular New York Jewish culture – then contrasted with the brutality of the Israeli gangsters. Ie. this is a film that has a lot, and it being a lot might be the reason why each of the elements feels not quite up to the best, but each is in itself a pleasure to see, and certainly the scenes with Hoffman are a delight. It’s the one section I wish the film had lingered on longest.

The film has perhaps the best sound design I’ve seen this year, allowing us to understand the soundscapes of the city, the contrast to Niki’s experience of it, and the drama that creates. The sound design is also very good at evoking perspective on that sound, types of sound, distance from source, etc. It’s brilliant work, beautifully orchestrated with the other elements by director Daniel Roher, whose first fiction feature this is. TUNER has some superficial similarities to BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright, 2017), a much more successful genre piece which also makes brilliant use of sound. But as you can see from the above, they’re very different kinds of films. I loved seeing TUNER in spite of its faults.

I talk to Edmund Stenson, co-director with Daniel Rohar, of BLINK, a documentary which will be premiering at the London Film Festival with three screenings on October 13^th (Leicester Square), 14^th and 19th (NFT). It will get a nationwide theatrical release on 150 screens across the United States with Disney/ National Geographic beginning next week on October 4th. An extraordinary achievement for a documentary.

Leo, Colin, Laurent, Mia, Sebastien Pelletier, a local sherpa, and Edith Lemay take a brief rest while trekking to the Poon Hill viewpoint in Nepal. (Credit: MRC/Jean-Sébastien Francoeur)

The film tells the story of the Lemay-Pelletier family who discover that their eldest child Mia suffers from a rare genetic disease, retinitis pigmentosa, that will eventually end in blindness. To make matters worse, it turns out that three of their four children suffer from the same disease. What to do? A doctor suggests that they may want to build a memory bank of images their children can subsequently access once they go blind. They canvas their children for a bucket list of activities and they set out to make them come true by taking a year off and travelling to Africa, South Asia and Latin America. It’s a moving film, one that successfully avoids all the obvious traps — it’s not a travelogue, it’s not an infomercial on a disease, it’s not emotionally manipulative. It is however a very touching film, beautiful to look at, about family, parenthood, childhood; and resilience in the face of the unavoidable.

The Pelletier family (from left): Mia, Sebastien, Colin, Edith Lemay, Laurent and Leo in Kuujjuaq, Canada. (Credit: National Geographic/Katie Orlinsky)

In the podcast I talk to Edmund Stenson about the making of the film, his working process with co-director Daniel Roher (of Navolny fame) what a documentary filmmaker does, how narrative is shaped in this form, the contributions of the film editors, the differences between the starting idea and what eventually comes out via filming and editing.

Ed is also a Warwick Film/TV graduate so from about the 33^rd minute of the podcast I also ask him about process: how does a film/TV graduate end up as a director of documentaries, particularly as high profile a feature as this one.

The podcast may be listened to here: