Shoot the Piano Player (1960) Review
Noir and charming silliness come together in Paris
François Truffaut’s 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste) is classic Nouvelle Vague, which really means film noir made by young Parisians, with occasional homages to other genres. Fast, jovial, carefree, but also conventionally fatalistic, as film noir should be. Charles Aznavour is perfectly cast as the stoic, ill-fated pianist. He keeps playing the piano, barely acting, hoping life will eventually forget all about him and nothing will happen anymore. Wishful thinking in the movies, of course, whereas in life that’s usually the case.
A typical example of the Nouvelle Vague approach: take an American genre, especially noir, and use its conventions as form only, freeing the film to talk about anything, usually with as little depth as any dive bar conversation. And so a gangster kidnapping turns into a series of musings on les femme, l’amour and le destin.
The young French women coming of age in the late 50s and early 60s are a trademark of the Nouvelle Vague, substituting the American femme fatale for a typically middle-class Parisian young girl, a bit disoriented, forced to enter the overwhelming production process, learning to betray as they go along. Shoot the Piano Player is a good case of that, and the women infatuate the screen all right, especially Léna (Marie Dubois).
Truffaut is more balanced than his double, Jean-Luc Godard. He does not go for useless excesses, his films are steady and sure of themselves, which might make them less cinematically interesting than Godard's, but much more reliable and long-lasting. One does not give up on a Truffaut film, whereas one barely stands to watch most of Godard films after 1966.
Even the finest of Godard’s films made in the early sixties seem outdated, and grow more vacuous and sterile with each watch (Masculin feminin is the exception). Godard’s just too much of everything, whether it’s style, experimentation or radical politics. It suited the heyday of the 60s, but now watching his films feels like playing with a kid in the backyard: it can be quite fun for ten minutes or so, but then it’s time to join the adults back at the dinner table, have a drink and a real conversation.
Truffaut could be a part of such conversation. Most of his films, especially in the 70s (Day for Night, The Story of Adele H.), withstand the test of time and do not boil down to playful exercises on style and cinematic language. Shoot the Piano Player resisted quite well the breaking and rolling back of the French New Wave.
The film has smart shots, yes, but the camera also knows when to merely stand back and gaze with its beautiful black-and-white Cinemascope photography and just let the witty script and its characters do the trick. There’s slapstick, romance, destiny, bleakness (the final, tragic shootout in the snow at the cottage), sex, pseudo-philosophy and good music in less than one hour and a half. Seulement en France.
