Review of ‘The Piano Contest’: Family and musical fractures

Belgian director Dominique Deruddere rose to prominence in the late 1980s with his first two feature films, Crazy Love and Wait for Spring, Bandini, both based on novels by writers on the cutting edge, Charles Bukowski and John Fante, respectively. The filmmaker gradually lost steam and spaced out his work, only making half a dozen films since then. ‘The Piano Competition’ is the last of them and has little to do with those that cemented his ephemeral prestige.

The movie It focuses on a young pianist and alternates between two tempos. In the present, she enters with the other 11 finalists a prestigious piano competition in a place called The Chapel, where she must prepare herself while isolating herself from the outside: laptops and cell phones are forbidden. In the past, that of her childhood, we are told the root of the traumas of the present, with a possessive mother obsessed with her being a famous pianist, and a father who destroys with an axe the piano that her mother has bought her.

‘The Piano Competition’ is a well-crafted film about complex behaviorThe director uses a tone that is too academic for a story that demands a little more visceral than the blows of the father’s axe. The music, exquisite and classical, does not always compensate for the emotional wanderings of the protagonist and those around her.