Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection

Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection
by Fran?ois Truffaut

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Mich?le Mercier, Nicole Berger, Serge Davri
Director: Fran?ois Truffaut
Brand: AZNAVOUR,CHARLES
Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard
Writer: Fran?ois Truffaut
Editor: Claudine Bouch?
Editor: C?cile Decugis
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Writer: David Goodis
Writer: Marcel Moussy
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 92 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-06
Studio: Astor Pictures Corporation

Movie Reviews of Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection

Movie Review: A novelty
Summary: 5 Stars

Novelty, in its finer sense, of freshness and originality, is the word which, to me most closely sums up the character of 'Shoot the Piano Player'. I didn't know what to expect the first time I watched it, so I found myself automatically trying to place it within some category or genre with which I was already familiar.

At first, it seemed that it was going to be one of those whimsical fantasies, supposedly grounded in gritty real-life circumstances, but whose clever dialogue and quirky characters reveal it to be merely a surface entertainment. This was suggested by the opening serio-comic scene where a character is running for his life and runs head-first into a lamp pole. On being assisted by a passer-by, the two begin an unhurried and desultory conversation about love and marriage before the runner again takes up his flight. Or was it desultory? The passer-by is a man who has followed the conventionally accepted path of a life built around wife and children; not an ecstatic, thrilling life, but a satisfying and worthwhile one. The runner, even in his frantic effort to escape danger, feels drawn to listen wistfully to the description of a happy, settled domestic existence. We know, just from his brief appearance, the runner is a quirky, impulsive, anarchic type who would never fit that mold.

So, the tone is set for what follows. Seemingly light-hearted, whimsical, comedic, even farcical episodes succeed one another, but underneath there is the seriousness of life: the reaching for happiness,the wrong choices made, the actions which should have been taken and were not, the consequences, the guilt and the desire to escape the same. There are episodes where the dark side of life reveals itself clearly and undisguised. The point seems to be, among others, that life belongs to no genre, transcending all of them just as the film does.

The piano player has found in his music a refuge from the pain of life and his own failures. He stands aloof from both impulse and conventionality. He is now afraid to reach out for what life might offer, because he has seen that what is offered can be taken away. Yet there is something basically decent about this small, withdrawn man who lives through his music. This decency, perhaps along with his diffidence, is attractive to a high-spirited, courageous girl who aims to assist him back into the mainstream of life. Paradoxically, this shy loner seems as bold as brass when it comes to cavorting with the good-hearted prostitute who lives next door. But this is not love, and only shows the compartmentalization of his character.

Consistent with the tragic aspect of the story, just when the piano player has joined with his new-found love to make a fresh start, quirky and irrational forces conspire to put all their plans in jeopardy. The tale plays out to the end, with the serious and comic mingling and refusing to stay in their neat, assigned, separate orbits.

There are conclusions which can be drawn about the underlying meanings of the film, but as I watched it for the second time around, I realized that the real enjoyment of it is to experience the whole composition without trying to extract and analyse separate elements. I personally felt a great deal of empathy for the piano player and his heroine, and I suppose that is a major key to whether you will like it or not. The music, the sassy women, the piano-player's quirky outlaw brothers, the somewhat nerdy but surprisingly lethal pair of unlikely hit men who become his nemeses, the beautifully filmed but heartrending scenes in the snow of the ultimate confrontation with bumbling evil, as well as the piano-player's attempts to accommodate himself to life, all combine to make this an addition to my personal cult favorites.

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Summary of Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection

Francois Truffaut is drunk on the possibilities of cinema in this, his most playful, anarchic film. Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Piano Player relates the adventures of the mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour, in a triumph of hangdog deadpan) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair. Loaded with gags, guns, clowns, and thugs, this razor-sharp homage to the American gangster film is pure nouvelle vague.

A man runs through deserted night streets, stalked by the lights of a car. It's a definitive film noir situation, promptly sidetracked--yet curiously not undercut--by real-life slapstick: watching over his shoulder for pursuers, the running man charges smack into a lamppost. The figure that helps him to his feet is not one of the pursuers (they've oddly disappeared) but an anonymous passerby, who proceeds to escort him for a block or two, genially schmoozing about the mundane, slow-blooming glories of marriage. The Good Samaritan departs at the next turning, never to be identified and never to be seen again. And the first man--who, despite this evocative introduction, is not even destined to be the main character of the movie--immediately resumes his helter-skelter flight from an as-yet-unspecified and unseen menace.

The opening of Shoot the Piano Player, Fran?ois Truffaut's second feature film, is one of the signal moments of the French New Wave--an inspired intersection of grim fatality and happy accident, location shooting and lurid melodrama, movie convention and frowzy, uncontainable life. At this point in his career--right after The 400 Blows, just before his great Jules and Jim--the world seemed wide for Truffaut, as wide as the Dyaliscope screen that he and cinematographer Raoul Coutard deployed with unprecedented spontaneity and lyricism. Anything might wander into frame and become part of the flow: an oddball digression, an unexpected change of mood, a small miracle of poetic insight.

The official agenda of the movie is adapting a noirish story by American writer David Goodis, about a celebrated concert musician (Charles Aznavour) hiding out as a piano player in a saloon. He's on the run as much as the guy--his older brother--in the first scene. But whereas the brother is worried about a couple of buffoonish gangsters, Charlie Koller is ducking out on life, love, and the possibility that he might be hurt, or cause hurt, again. Decades after its original release, Shoot the Piano Player remains as fresh, exhilarating, and heartbreaking--as open to the magic of movies and life--as ever. --Richard?T. Jameson

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