Shoot the Piano Player (1960)

Sometimes marketed as Shoot the Pianist, this François Truffaut film had sat among the Netflix suggestions for me for a long time before I agreed to add it to my queue. I had found the title alternately intriguing and off-putting. Oddly enough, nobody in the film ever says the title (or its French equivalent), and enemies don't spend much time trying to shoot the title character.

That character, a former celebrity brought down emotionally by a personal tragedy, now makes a living playing in a dive. He'd rather have nothing to do with his career criminal brothers, but desperation leads one to beg for his help. One little favor is all it takes for him to gain further, much less welcome attention, like he might get in a Hitchcock classic....

This was Truffaut's second feature, coming a year after The 400 Blows. It reminds me more of the same year's Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. Where Godard experimented by telling actors their lines immediately before delivery, Truffaut and company made parts of the script up as they went along, not even deciding on an ending until right before they shot it. This was largely in reaction to a lack of funding by any studio, but that makes it no less artistically bold in my book.

StPP has several other unusual aspects that I won't go into, partly because they're subtle enough to elude my memory. Suffice it to say that they are more characteristic of Truffaut than of any conventional genre. The film is decidedly not noir -- too brightly lit and a little too tickling in parts -- but clearly owes something to noir. I leave it to the more academically minded to analyze the meaning of it all.

For my own part, what stands out most is the protagonist's crippling introversion, highlighted by thought narration and most obvious in the presence of attractive women. (Warning: French cinema in 1960 didn't censor breasts in erotic contexts.) As an introvert myself, it's nice to see representation in unexpected contexts, however antiheroic.

Does the overall approach work? To me it does. Improvisation staves off predictability and adds an emotional charge to turns of events. Whatever the artistic merits, it entertains us to this day as well. Sadly, it didn't work for the box office, so Truffaut had to change his ways a tad. I still want to check out more of his later efforts, eventually.