Movie: Shoot the Piano Player - Tirez sur le pianiste (Francois Truffaut, 1960)
You don't need to read anything about the making of Shoot the Piano Player to sense that it's made on the fly. Similarly to films like Chungking Express and Beat the Devil, it is almost entirely driven by talent and instinct, consistently making bold aesthetic and narrative choices that feel spontaneous and sometimes contradictory, yet always make sense. Truffaut's first priority in each and every scene is to make the interesting or surprising choice, fully confident that he can make it work within the greater context. It leads to an exhiliratingly fun film that also manages to connect wholly separate periods and styles of filmmaking. If that isn't enough, it also works as a great character study.
In a flashback we learn that the unassuming Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour), who plays piano in a local bar and mostly keeps to himself, is actually Edouard Saroyan, a potentially major talent who used to play in serious concert halls for serious audiences before his career was cut short by tragedy. The built-up to that tragedy plays like a melodrama from the early days of film, filled with exaggerated acts of romanticism and despair, expressed through outsized emotions and poetic, gravely serious dialogue. You wouldn't expect lines like "When you are lost in the night, you can't stop tbe shadows from closing in" to appear in a playfully ironic 90's crime-comedy. And yet, that's what Shoot the Piano Player often evokes when it returns to the present day. Here we find Charlie and his new girl Lena (Marie Dubois) on the run from a few gangsters seeking to find Charlie's brother Chico, a guy who should know by now that he is too aloof to get involved in complicated criminal plots. This time though his adversaries aren't much more sophisticated. Their schemes keep failling apart when they get too invested in their meaningless banter to pay attention to what's going on around them.
The lighthearted comic touch in the 'present day' should be at odds with the theatrically tragic mood of Edouard's story, but Truffaut's writing and Charles Aznavour's performance help link the two. Whether he is Edouard or Charlie, Aznavour suffers from shyness, which shapes at all times his relationship witb the world around him. Shoot the Piano Player contains a close-up of Edouard's finger ringing the bell of his future impressario. It's a shot thas has very often been copied, and used to illustrate the French New Wave. I didn't know it comes from here, but it is indeed the key shot of the film. As it comes during the most freewheeling, experimental sequence, it is easy to miss that Edouard never actually rings the bell. The door only opens because the imoressario's previous client - a woman violinist who we then follow all the way out of the building as we hear Edouard's piano music on the soundtrack - has opened it to leave. The world conspiring to give you what you want, without you needing to do anything about it actively is a wish fulfillment fantasy for a shy person, but is not a recipe for long-lasting happiness.
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