François Truffaut
Tirate sul pianista

For his second attempt as a director, which in some ways served as a chance to prove himself to those who believed "The 400 Blows" was an isolated triumph by a critic soon to join the ranks, François Truffaut chose to engage with genre cinema, reinterpreting the North American noir and setting it in the misty atmospheres of nighttime Paris.

The choice fell on an anonymous novella by David Goodis, which narrated the adventures of a down-and-out pianist who, due to two delinquent brothers, found himself involuntarily involved in various criminal affairs.

It may come as a surprise that after a debut indulged in biographism and a poetic vision of life, Truffaut gravitated towards a narrative and cinematic genre so different: the surprise is only apparent if one considers two passions the director never hid in his youth and his previous militancy as a critic, genre fiction, particularly crime fiction, and the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, whom Truffaut admired to the point of dedicating a comprehensive interview-book to him some years later.

The choice also had undeniable benefits: it avoided a return to the themes of his debut film, attempting to demonstrate an eclecticism that critics themselves might appreciate, at most forgiving a potential misstep due to attempting to move away from the already seen; it catered to the tastes of an audience generally benevolent towards noir; and rode the wave of Godard's debut, which, in "Breathless", had itself confronted the genre by deconstructing its forms.

It's unknown if in Truffaut, who had participated in the making of that film, there was also the ambition to measure himself against Godard, showing the ability to handle the theme as effectively as his friend-rival, but nothing excludes that "Shoot the Piano Player" (1960) was a variation on a theme dear to the authors of the "new wave", claiming a certain ownership of that style.

From the title itself, a reversal of a Western tradition motto, it's evident how the film, while rooted in noir, has an ironic undertone: whereas in genre films the pianist is a side character, tending to adorn the scene yet also disappear from it, in this work the situation is reversed, and the character who wants to remain unnoticed by everyone in the suburban bistro, counting only for his music, for sound not image, becomes the narrative engine of the whole story, and at the same time, the subject upon whom every possible trouble and misfortune rains down.

From a structural standpoint, it may not be novel if one considers how, in Hitchcock's work, secondary characters, seemingly harmless, became the undisputed protagonists of the thrill; the originality of "Shoot the Piano Player" – and in this, too, Truffaut shows himself both inside and outside of tradition at the same time – lies in the fact that the innocent in turn hides something, a past he wants to voluntarily detach from and a fault that doesn’t make him less negative than the many characters revolving around him.

The film reveals to us, step by step and with recourse to flashbacks, the reasons for the protagonist's solitude and desire for dissolution, showing us how the basis for the talented musician’s self-exile behind the scenes of the metropolis's anonymous outskirt lies in the disillusionment with the art world, which once saw him as a promising concert performer hindered by a sense of inadequacy, and a sentimental drama stemming from his inability to make peace with himself and the woman once loved.

These are themes that anticipate, almost like an overture, many of Truffaut’s forthcoming films, making "Shoot the Piano Player" understandable, after the self-presentation of "The 400 Blows", as the true debut of the French director, his first real attempt to make cinema a profession, and not merely a programmatic manifesto and intellectual experiment.

If considered as a debut film – i.e., as the first attempt to direct something not derived from one's own life experience, but rather a revisiting of another’s experience – "Shoot the Piano Player" simultaneously reveals strengths and limitations, the same that, in my opinion, Truffaut would showcase for several years to come.

The strengths of the film are all in Truffaut's language: the settings and the photography are what, in music, we might define as the piece's key; and there's no doubt that "Shoot the Piano Player" is distinguished by continuous variations of tone, from the melancholy of the beginning to the more tense and frenetic scenes of involvement in the crime, destined to culminate in a murder, returning to the romantic and desperate moods of the protagonist’s apartment and his fleeting encounters with a prostitute, as (almost) always tender-hearted.

Truffaut’s emotional touch decisively dwells on what would become the cherished subject of his cinema: women and love, the love for a woman who knows how to love, each in her own way, each following her own destiny. At least three women revolve around the protagonist, of different backgrounds, of different appearance, each captured by actresses and director in her most intimate dimension: from the woman’s point of view – always dear to Truffaut – the pianist’s story can be understood as the story of three loves attempted and denied, broken and shattered by life.

Unlike an Antonioni, never loved, Truffaut is not the bard of uncommunicated loves, of silence, as if the absence of life consumes feelings; rather, in this film, it's already hinted that life itself consumes men, women, and loves, to reclaim, in the same moment, the need for the presence and absence of the person one cares for, the need to sit in the shadow behind a piano and for an embrace.

  The faults of the film can be addressed more briefly: the synthesis of "The 400 Blows" seems suddenly absent, and sometimes the film seems to lose compactness and unravel, waiving even the need for a concentration of location, time, and spaces that made the fortune of genre films, as demonstrated by Hitchcock himself, not too closely followed by Truffaut in the lengthy epilogue at the mountain cabin where the film concludes. The same mingling of genres sometimes appears schematic, fragmenting the narrative in the various moments of the protagonist’s life, unable to reweave the subplots into a single weave.

The risk, at times, can be to disorient, and the underlying sensation is that the original noir subject was interpolated with poetic digressions inconsistent with the material treated.

With that said, "Shoot the Piano Player" is also a film that isn’t forgotten: thanks to the characterization of the "pseudo-French" Charles Aznavour, who, not surprisingly, made the melancholy tone and disillusionment the hallmark of a career, the protagonist's gaze in this film, his letting go, his renouncing of life and settling for shadow and modesty, Truffaut gifts us another fundamental character.

Then, that Aznavour's gaze sometimes recalls that of Antoine Doinel may be coincidence; and perhaps by chance, the young director's attempt to exorcize the terror for his true debut with a film dealing with terror: the terror of being nothing in front of art, of having neither voice nor words to meet the expectations towards oneself and the hopes of others.