Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection (1962)

Greatest Film of the French New Wave (Truffaut's Masterpiece)

The crown jewel of the French New Wave and Truffaut's underrated masterpiece--this bittersweet, melancholy film is a comic gangster B-movie, a tragic romance, an innocent drama of the human condition which the absurd hero Charlie can only make sense of through the music of his piano. April 15, 2008

Offbeat, undisciplined, sprawling, funny, sad, goofy, loving, uncategorizable

Before there was Jim Jarmusch, before there was Quentin Tarentino, before there were the Coen Brothers, there was Francois Truffaut and the whole French New Wave. Films that we consider wild and radical today are actually old hat, as this type of bold, irreverent, sassy, rule-breaking, in-your-face cinema has now been with us at least half a century. Sadly, many Americans probably think "New Wave" is a kind of bad dance music from the 80s.

Truffaut's second film, from 1960 (!), deals with a lot of Hollywood staples, but he freshens it up, even more than he appears to give himself credit for, with the very direct, very informal French style of movie-making (and, I'd also add, living). His bold confidence shows itself in the first scene. It begins in the middle of action, without explanation, and a character comes onto the scene who helps our protagonist and volunteers personal information. So he's going to be crucial to our plot, right? No, because he then exits and is never seen again. And guess what? --Our "protagonist" is actually not a very important character either. He just serves to introduce us to his brother, the *real* main character, and to get some small-time thugs on the brother's tail. (Has any other film dared to start like this, either before or since?) So you could argue he's a new twist on an old device, the maguffan. (And we all know how Truffaut loved Hitchcock.)

Structurally this film should just not work. There's a flashback in the middle that takes up half the film at least and introduces a new key character when we're halfway through the picture. Every film teacher would tell you that's "wrong." And for many critics, especially initially, the film didn't work. Reviews were lukewarm at best and for years this languished as one of Truffaut's lesser efforts. Yet it must have sunk in at least subliminally, because the irreverent tone, the loose unpredictability, the large cast, the fast pace and rapid cross-cutting, and the humorous asides (one thug swears to something on the life of his mother, and we cross-cut to his mother dropping over dead) have all found a home in the films of the Coens, Tarentino, Jarmusch, Altman and many others. Not to mention shooting outdoors at night without movie lights, shooting in real cars without projection backdrops, shooting on live locations rather than closed sets. Yes, the first thing that strikes you about this picture today is how modern it is. Watch a typical American film from 1960 for comparison.

There were a few things that left me unsatisfied. The character of the prostitute feels more like a gimmick, and we never resolve anything with her. The fight and subsequent stabbing of the bar owner also feels extraneous, as though it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. And it's hard to imagine that our main character would still have his job in the bar after that! (He was cleared by the police awfully easily too. Or was that part supposed to make us laugh?) And somehow the ending was a *little* unsatisfying, though I'm not sure what I'd do differently. (Have him playing piano in a *different* bar perhaps?)

But these are relatively minor nitpicks. We're swept away and don't think about them too much. There's also this feeling we get from Truffaut that he's trying to wedge things in to experiment (the French New Wave was in its infancy after all), to see what can work and what can't. I'd rather have something too adventurous than dull.

What of the performances? The first thing you'll probably be struck by, especially if you're new to New Wave cinema or European film in general, is how naturalistic the acting is--it's much freer than Americans were accustomed to in 1960, free of many stage conventions we were still carrying around. In Charles Aznavour we have a Francois Truffautesque character (Truffuat in a supplementary interview, goes to great pains to point out how the main character is not typically French, but I think he's trying to distract us from how much the character is like *him.* I didn't really buy his contention, and I don't think it's evident in the film that Aznavour is Albanian and not French.) Marie Dubois and Nicole Berger are both wonderful in their roles, as Dubois in particularly is perfect as someone both pure and feisty--she is the backbone of the movie, and this part could have fallen apart if it had been miscast. Michele Mercier is charismatic and gorgeous and really really stacked, quite frankly. The two thugs are the perfect counterbalance to all the French angst we get from the main cast, and have provided inspiration to all the talky, haphazard and bumbling thugs that have graced countless American films since.

This Criterion print is extremely clean, in anamorphic widescreen. Sound is clear first-rate mono. Extras include lively commentaries from two Truffaut writers and film school professors, the original trailer, two interviews with Truffaut about the film and the book it comes from, interviews with others who worked with Truffaut, a discussion of the music scoring, and a fascinating screen test where Truffaut tries in vain to make Marie Dubois curse like a sailor (necessary for a scene in the film).

If you've never seen a Truffaut film, I'd suggest you start here--you'll be surprised by how modern it all feels. (You think post-modern irreverence in film is a recent invention, huh?) This film is a delight, and shows the tremendous artistic potential cinema had in the 1960s--potential that's been squandered in more recent times.
July 1, 2007

Shoot the Piano Player

This quirky crime film by the great Truffaut mixes sight-gag comedy with suspense, resulting in a superbly nutty homage to the 1940s film noirs he so admired. French crooner Aznavour is terrific as the timid keyboardist on the outs with the mob. Filling the screen with inventive visuals and advancing an ad-hoc plotline with plenty of false digressions, Truffaut gives this tale the exhilarating feel of a spontaneous spoof. Based on the novel by David Goodis, "Player" is a brilliant tribute to the spirit of noir and the French New Wave. June 28, 2007

The PIANO PLAYER is music to my ears.......

I am a great fan of the late, great French director, Francois Truffaut. I must confess that I haven't seen nearly enough of his films. It was so great to add SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER to the list of his films that I have watched, and it is definitely a great one. PIANO PLAYER is a cross between French new wave, film noir, slapstick comedy and a tribute to American gangster movies. Based on DOWN THERE, a novel by David Goodis, this 1960 film features a piano player with a past (Charles Aznavour). Though, he plays nightly at a honky tonk, this man once packed concert halls and had a classical repertoire. We find about that later. Taking the name "Charles," he has started his life over with a new, adopted identity. What's more, he has tried to turn his back on the shadey dealings of his brothers. This doesn't go according to plan, of course. What's more, he finds romance with the beautiful Lena (Marie Dubois), a waitress at the honky tonk. Then, the plot continues to thicken.

I really don't want to spoil this for you, so, no more plot details will be revealed here. However, there is a very good reason that this masterpiece was added to the Criterion Collection of classic cinema, worthy of being preserved as part of their DVD collection. Though, initially, Parisian audiences didn't take so well to this film, it went on to earn a cult following, of sorts. The film noir (black film) inspired cinematography, that boldly deceives us with shadow, light, and obscure, angular shots, paired with broad, self-effacing humor, makes this story truly distinctive. Charlie, the piano player, is neither hero nor villain. He is a man put in the middle of a series of absurd and (ultimately) violent incidents he must make his way through. Does it help that the man must battle his timidity, as well as his lack of courage? No. Ample references are made to other films in this movie, and you can definitely see that Truffaut was paying tribute to films that had inspired him, as well as creating his own vision (he adapted the screenplay from the novel himself). June 15, 2007

Impossible to characterize, but funny, touching and sad

Asks the interviewer, "What place would you give Shoot the Piano Player in relation to your other films?" Answers director François Truffaut, "No place. Simply the second film I made." Considering his first feature film was The Four Hundred Blows and his third was Jules et Jim, Truffaut's matter-of-factness and lack of pretense is worth a smile.

Shoot the Piano Player is worth smiles, too. It's a clever film, playful at times, even funny. More than anything, however, it defies categorization. The movie is a strange and successful amalgamation of crime and comedy, suspense and inevitability, tragedy and love, and gangsters, girl friends and violence. It's the story of Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour), a piano player in a Paris dive, who used to be Eduoard Saroyan, a famous pianist, whose wife committed suicide. Truffaut says the movie is a film about a shy man. Charlie is the kind of shy man who cannot bring himself to touch the hand of a woman he wants. He can't go back and open the door to the room where he left his wife sobbing. He thinks about what he should do, but can't do it, and then circumstances take over. Charlie, thanks to his brothers, finds himself in a gangland underworld where double-crossing is going to lead to a shootout in the snow. Some say Shoot the Piano Player is an homage to American gangster films. Perhaps it is, but I challenge anyone to spend much time considering this possibility while watching the movie. The film is original, funny, moving and sad. It's the kind of film that people who love movies write essays about. All I know is that I was moved by Charlie. We leave him where we met him, playing piano in a Paris dive.

Charles Aznavour, a diminutive man with a hangdog look, plays Charlie perfectly. Aznavour is probably better known in the U. S. as a singer, but in France he's seen as both an actor and a singer. He's a minimalist, he says about himself. Charlie thinks too much and does too little. Aznavour lets us see into Charlie's soul with few words. It's a marvelous performance that left me saddened by Charlie, but liking him.

The Criterion DVD transfer is first-rate. Criterion gives us two discs. The first has the movie and a commentary track. The second disc contains interviews by Aznavour and Marie Dubois, who played Charlie's girlfriend, Lena, plus excerpts from documentaries featuring Truffaut, and other extras. The Criterion case contains a 28 page booklet with substantial material on the film and Truffaut. January 7, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...