Truffaut's New Wave Screwball Noir Comedy Hits SIFF Cinema
Every time we've seen Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player in the video store, we've glanced at it and put it back, unable to imagine how the Truffaut we know from Au Revoir Les Enfants would draw good work from a pulp crime novel.
That's why it's taken us so long to find out what a fun, cinematic grab-bag the movie is; happily, SIFF Cinema has a new 35mm print of Shoot the Piano Player, showing through February 5, and that inspired us to visit McCaw Hall this weekend.
From the opening shot, Truffaut toys with your expectations. A man runs headlong down a Paris street, pursued by a car. He rounds a corner and runs full speed into a lamp post. A bystander revives him and helps him up, they walk off together, and the bystander chooses that moment to recount his romantic life's development, confessing that he didn't really fall in love with his wife until after they were married.
Love, fidelity, and attitudes toward love and fidelity are much on the movie's mind, which is surprising given that its plot is driven by two very chatty thugs double-crossed by the piano player's larcenous brothers. Charles Aznavour, the piano player in question, wears a sad little Buster-Keatonish poker face. Buttoned up in a trench coat, he is a man with a dark past, but his furtive attempts to hold a waitress's hand, accompanied by his racing-thought narration, don't call to mind Bogart but Woody Allen. That said, the comedy is a Gallic comedy--the bleakness of life can be laughed at, but it'll get you in the end. It feels kind of right for February.
