Shoot The Piano Player

It's sort've a weird movie or Truffaut - feels a lot more like something his pal Godard would come up with. It's got that kinetic, experimental edge to it, while almost all the other Truffauts I've seen are much more traditional (this does not mean worse.)

Also a weird movie for sappy chanson superstar Charles Aznavour to star in!

I hesitate to call this movie an exercise in style over substance as the story is not bad, but its the way Truffaut goes about telling it that is the most interesting aspect. This is really one of the most experimental films in his catalog, a weird ode to film noir mixed with New Wave sensibilities.

It's been said that Truffaut set out to make a gangster picture and then realized that he hated gangsters so he instead decided to make “a gangster story that refused to behave like a gangster story” (I wrote a paper on this film in college, so I still have a variety of quotes about it). This comes out in one of my favorites aspects of the movie - the actual plot is continually brushed off by the leads. Charlie, the waitress Lena, and Fido are all at the mercy of the "bad guys" at various points of the film but never seem to worry. Look at when the two escape around the film's midpoint. They simply go on without a second thought.

Not to delve too deeply, but there a lot of fun quirks to this film that make it memorable. For instance, the flashback to Charlie's past is told by Lena who was not there for any of it. Are we to take it all for granted as truth? One thing to certainly take note of is how every important decision in the film is brought about by a woman. Charlie does nothing for himself. His wife is the only reason he got an interview, while the woman leaving the room right before his appointment is the only reason he actually went through with going and Lena drags him through the rest of the plot.

Yeah, and it can be disorientating on first viewing it because it doesn'ty really *announce* itself as an exercise as much as most of the artsy european flicks from that era tend to; I had some difficulty jumping from "straightforward french noir" to "nouvelle vague deconstruction" the first time I saw it.

Love the On Dangerous Ground homage towards the end, too.