Shoot the Piano Player
Francois Truffaut followed up his wonderful debut, an ode to his youth called “The 400 Blows,” with a crime drama called “Shoot the Piano Player.” It feels like a riff on Hitchcock’s classic trope- that of the innocent man, falsely accused- but it comes down to characters making choices about whether to help other characters, or getting involved with other characters out of happenstance. This is my second viewing of it, and I enjoy it, but not as much as a lot of other Truffaut films.
Based upon a novel by David Goodis, the film begins with a man (Fido, played by Richard Kanayan) walking into a hole-in-the-wall jazz bar; he has a shiner for an eye. The pianist is someone he knows very well, though he now goes by a different name- it’s his brother, Edouard (Charles Aznavour), though he now goes by Charlie Kohler. Fido and his other brother, Chico (Albert Rémy), are in deep with some criminals they’ve screwed over on a job, and now, he sees Charlie as a way to get out of a tough jam. Of course, now that puts a target on Charlie’s back, which he doesn’t want, and would rather just be left alone. When a waitress (Lena, played by Marie Dubois) and he are followed by the criminals, though they cannot get out of the situation, and Charlie feels the pull of his past getting to him.
The film is borrowing from Hitchcock in a way, but more than that, Truffaut is making a lovely little film noir here; in that genre, crime is always a street-level situation, and is unavoidable by the characters, regardless of how good they try to be. Charlie is as archetypal a noir hero as you can ask for here- his past is that he has changed his name from Edouard to escape who he was, which was an acclaimed classical pianist. How did he become a jazz pianist at a smokey bar? His change in occupation is reflective of the change he has undergone emotionally after the suicide of his wife; Aznavour is an intriguing protagonist for us- we become engaged with him as a character, and what we think initially will be about he and his brothers becomes just about him as he has to navigate this new complication in his life. Charlie has a love interest in Lena, and she’s not a typical femme fatale, as she becomes a sympathetic companion when he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation at a key point in the story. Coming in at a brisk 85 minutes, “Shoot the Piano Player” has some nice momentum in terms of story and the way it turns its story into a noir like the ones the directors of the French New Wave had discovered prior to making their own films, but it feels more like a film Truffaut made as a critical exercise, for the purpose of making a noir, rather than the personal expressions that would leave the most significant impact on his legacy.
