Sandwiched in between two of Francois Truffaut’s most famous and enduring classics, “The 400 Blows” and “Jules and Jim,” was a movie that resisted classification in much the same way those two did, but did so without any of the granular realism or genre bucking ideas. “Shoot the Piano Player” was released in 1960 and was Truffaut’s specific way of going against the grain of “The 400 Blows,” a movie that was mostly noir but had a dash of humor and more than a few lapses in coherence.
Of course that’s all intentional on Truffaut’s part, and the film crackles with urgency, personality and style through its visual aesthetic and editing techniques, all of which pay heavy homages to the history of cinema.
Look no further than an image that features not one, but three pinhole shots in the frame, a little visual joke on Truffaut’s part. There’s also long, unbroken tracking shots of people walking and talking down the street, a camera that bobs and weaves around the bar and an eye that edits with alacrity as to keep the pace high. It’s a playful, detatched, even unique film to watch, but it maintains some of the down to Earth naturalism that would make the French New Wave what it was.
“Shoot the Piano Player” tells the story of Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), a piano player in a dive bar performing trashy soft shoe music each night. When his brother Chico (Albert Remy) comes in one evening on the run from two gangsters, he reveals that Charlie has a deep past as a virtuoso pianist and a hidden secret. He tries to keep this hidden from the bar’s waitress Lena (Marie Dubois) but as they get more involved, she becomes a target for the two gangsters pursuing Charlie’s brother.
Truffaut’s knack is not so much blending genres and styles but mashing them together. Charlie’s first walking date with Lena drifts from sinister to comical to solemn in a flash, with Charlie’s inner monologue tensing the mood until he begins silently counting until it’s long enough for him to make a pass at her again. In the mean time, the gangsters are following behind, but the movie seems to forget their presence as quickly as they arrive.
That energy makes “Shoot the Piano Player” so much more than intellectual and arty; it’s genuinely visceral, invoking back stories and shootouts and nonsense lyrics to a bar sing-a-long that beg to interpreted less seriously than “400 Blows.” That it achieves that goal and feels no less inconsequential as a film is a testament to Truffaut’s wonderful gift.