Movies - Shoot the Piano Player

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	Movies - Shoot the Piano Player

Shoot the Piano Player (original French title: Tirez sur le pianiste) is a 1960 film directed by François Truffaut.

A washed-up classical pianist, Charlie (Charles Aznavour), bottoms out after his wife's suicide stroking the keys in a Parisian dive bar. The waitress, Lena (Marie Dubois), is falling in love with Charlie, who it turns out is not who he says he is. When his brothers get in trouble with gangsters, Charlie inadvertently gets dragged into the chaos and is forced to rejoin the family he once fled. Truffaut's highly stylized and self-reflexive melodrama employs all of the hallmarks of French New Wave cinema: extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence camera shots, sudden jump-cutting and more.

Truffaut's film is loosely based on the novel Shoot The Piano Player by David Goodis. The film shares the novel's bleak plot about a man hiding from his shattered life by doing the only thing he knows how to do, while remaining unable to escape the past. However, Truffaut's work resolves itself into both a tribute to the American genre of literary and cinematic noir and a meditation on the relationship between art and commercialism. Films like this one tended to sideline their source material (here, Goodis' novel) in order to focus on the French New Wave directors' twin obsessions: Hollywood noir and themselves.

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