Preface

Although there are many movies from the past that I want to see that are not (yet) on DVD, I think that DVDs are now like books in allowing viewers de facto simultaneous access to the whole sweep of history. Just as it is possible to, say, put down the latest Danielle Steele novel and pick up Aristotle's Poetics, it is possible to watch "Birth of the Nation" whenever one is inclined to do so, before or after screening, say, "Shaun of the Dead" at home.

When I was discovering world cinema during the 1970s, I had to rely on what repertory cinemas programmed, and sometimes could not get to a screening I wanted to see. In my recent Blockbuster.com enrollments, I had a similar feeling of not having control over what I received of the many movies I want to see (that were in my queue)—though I have hundreds of DVDs on my own shelves to put in the DVD-player.

Now that I have returned to Netflix, I get films in the order of my queue, though my own whims in drawing from my home archive and what is broadcast on cable still affect the order in which I pick and choose what to watch.

I mostly saw the films of François Truffaut in chronological order, though this was due to the special circumstances of auditing a class on the "French New Wave" in which we saw the first three Truffaut movies in order—and twice, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, with a Wednesday seminar/discussion in between (and papers after our introduction to each of the three directors covered—Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut, and Alain Resnais. I saw most of the rest of Truffaut's movies as they came out (in the US, which was not quite in the order in which they were made). Truffaut was never my favorite "new wave" director (and after "Jules et Jim" was arguably not a "new wave" director, while Resnais arguably never was one). He made some movies that I liked (400 Blows, Mississippi Mermaid, Stolen Kisses, Confidentially Yours, and—more or less—The Bride Wore Black, Antoine and Colette—the most noirish Truffaut movies plus the earlier Antoine Doinel ones) and more that I didn't (Two English Girls, The Last Metro, The Man Who Loved Women, The Story of Adele H., The Wild Child), along with some about which I was very ambivalent (Day for Night, Small Change, Jules and Jim).

I remember that my favorite of the first three was "Tirez sur le pianiste" (Shoot the Piano Player) and have remembered the two falling-dead scenes and the sad face of Charles Aznavour (but little else) from the film. Having watched it again, I think that to some extent I was seeking to be different. Everyone loved "400 Blows." Most everyone loved "Jules and Jim," too, though I didn't much like it. I would now readily concede that "400 Blows" is not only the best of the first three Truffaut movies, but the best Truffaut movie period. But I can at least hope that in addition to wanting to take a less conventional position on the relative merits of the first three Truffaut movies, I appreciated the greater daringness of "Tirez," particularly in mixing genres.

I am (I promise) going to get around to reviewing the movie based on rewatching it, but only after remarking on another aspect of how we can now see movies in orders far from chronological.

When I was in the "French New Wave" class, the "wave" had already broken, and the "French New Wave" was a historical subject, a wave of the past. (Pressing the analogy, Truffaut and Resnais had rolled back or were rolling back into the sea of more conventional film-making and Godard had become foam on the beach.). Watching "Tirez sur le pianiste" now, I can remember movies that came after it. I think that "Diva," in particular was influenced by it (similarly mixing genres to the consternation of some viewers). And I have seen Aznavour look sad in "The Tin Drum" and "Ararat."

At the time I saw "Tirez" the first two times, I had seen little of what the Cahiers du Cinéma critics (including Truffaut and Godard) were reacting against—negatively in regard to French films of the 1950s and positively in regard to American genre films, noirs in particular. The only French films that I am sure I'd seen were Renoir's "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game" (the reputation of the latter puzzled me) and the only Nicholas Ray movies I'd seen were "Rebel Without a Cause" and "55 Days at Peking." (I also hadn't seen Raoul Walsh's "High Sierra," which now seems a fore-runner.)

I had seen "Casablanca," and I think that I had seen "Vertigo," but I'd have to find the paper I wrote for the course to know whether I saw connections to it that I see now. I had not seen "Dark Passage," a Bacall/Bogart movie I now love in part for its views of my adopted city, and which is based on Down There, a novel by David Goodis, who also wrote the novel, Down There on which "Tirez" is based (it is, BTW, set in Philadelphia rather than in Paris, though Goodis was one of the hard-boiled authors of what the French called romans durs that were valued much more highly in France than in the US, where they were regarded as pulp junk.

Now, I can see allusions and influences particularly of two Nicholas Ray movies I've seen in the years since that class that was much closer to the time the movies were made than it is to the present (sigh!): They Live by Night (1948) and On Dangerous Ground (1952). And what has to be an homage to one (of the many!) French directors of the previous generation who were exempted from Cahiers rejection of the immediate past, Jacques Becker (the fight in an alley behind a bar in which the fatal knife in the back really was desperate self-defense from Casque d'or). Plus, now I know that Aznavour is of Armenian descent and that this was supposed to be signaled by giving his character the last name "Saroyan," which was also an homage to the artist who starves to death in his room in Saroyan's "The daring young man on the flying trapeze," which I had not then read—or even heard of.)

The Review (finally!

"Tirez sur le pianiste" (Shoot the Piano Player) gets off to an odd start. A man is being chased by men in a car. Looking back, he runs into a light pole, and is knocked out. Someone happens along, helps the man on the ground up. The good Samaritan then confides his marital (or relationship) woes. And then both of them disappear. The viewer expects them to return at some point. A well-made movie (or story) does not begin with characters who are completely extraneous. (There's also the question of why the pursuers evaporate. He only imagined they were chasing him?)

The French "new wave" critics-turned-directors thought that their predecessors were too concerned about making smooth "well-made" movies. Truffaut blatantly changed tempi in this movie (most literally in a song which Aznavour accompanies on the piano, sung by a minor character and a song which has no relevance to the plot). I think it was Truffaut himself who said that the movie was "a comedy about a melancholic." Though primarily cinéma noir, with not one but two despairing romances, it is also a comedy with music-hall sequences, farce, dark humor, goonish gangsters, and a winsome, savvy child literally left over from "The 400 Blows" (Richard Kanayan as Fido).

The strange juxtapositions of genres seems to have thrown French audiences. After the huge and universal success of "The 400 Blows," "Tirez" was considered an instance of "sophomore slump." From the long perspective 46 years later, it looks like the most "new wave" of Truffaut's movies. To some degree, this is because it was shot by Godard's cinematographer Raoul Coutard (on the fly with some scenes underlit—by conventonal canons, anyway!) and has jump cuts (not just of scene, but of mood) like the early Godard movies, but mostly it is that Truffaut's attitude was "I don't have to do things the way they are usually done" combined with familiarity and appreciation of American noirs and gangster movies (insofar as a line can be drawn between those genres!).

Post-WWII American noirs were big not only on shadows but in using voice-overs. Truffaut's protagonist, Charlie Kohler, the piano player in a honky-tonk bar, who used to be a rising star concert pianist Edourad Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) has extensive voice-overs, but they are present-tense ones: what he is thinking, not narrations of how the narrator got to the desperate juncture he (almost always he in the American noirs) has reached (including being dead in "Sunset Boulevard," as, much later, in "American Beauty"). Charlie is shy and very tentative toward a barmaid, Léna (Marie Dubois) who is interested in him. (This is obvious to the viewer, but not to Charlie.)

We learn (Charlie tells Léna rather than a narrator telling the viewer) that he has been traumatized by an earlier love that led to the death of his wife Thérèse and a very heavy (and not unjustified) load of guilt. He does not want to risk harming someone else. (As Henry Adams described his position after his wife's suicide, when Adams was 47, Charlie is "too young to die and too old to start over."

Léna persists. The feared disaster is brought on inadvertently by Charlie's son, Fido, and, more blameworthily by his perennially screwing-up brother Chico (Truffaut regular Albert Rémy). I don't want to spoil the plot (or plots in that the tentative approach-avoidance romance comes together with a gangster comedy that has uncomic consequences).

Fido and the gangsters Plyne (Serge Davri) and Momo (Claude Mansard) who are pursuing Chico adumbrated "Home Alone" and is pretty funny. The quest of Plyne and Momo for money they stole with Chico has echoes of the comedy of Waiting for Godot (a French play by an Irish-born playwright, drawing heavily on his experiences in France during WWII), too.

I find the music (which I think is meant to be funny) tedious. The "amour triste" is not great, but pretty good. Maria Dubois and Nicole Berger are both sympathetic, and one can see why Edourad/Charlie behaved as he did and feel the tristesse he carries,


Plot spoiler alert

In some ways, "Tirez" is the antithesis of "Dark Passage," the earlier movie based on a novel by David Goodis. In "Dark Passage," the loving woman (a young Lauren Bacall) saves a suspicious hardened man (an escaped convict played by Humphrey Bogart)—and after some nearly surrealistic traumas, there is a radiant happy ending.

In "Tirez," disaster strikes again, and the love of Léna does not save Charlie from his beaten-down (hang-dog-looking) remorse. In most Bogart movies of the 1940s (less so in "Dark Passage" than in any other that comes to mind), Bogart's character grumbles and claims to be uninvolved (too cool to care), but eventually acts and shows that he does care. However reluctantly (but successfully) he challenges the bad guys.

Charlie in effect sides with the bad guys (his brother and his confederate) against the inept bad guys (Plyne and Momo). Rather than redeeming Charlie, Léna gets herself killed, thereby increasing the already heavy load of grief and despair Charlie carries. Getting involved again was a new disaster.

End spoiler alert

"Tirez sur le pianiste" is always going to be a favorite of a minority of the audience, even the audience for foreign "art" films. Call us the "unhappy few"? The abrupt changes of pace and genre have put off many viewers, and will continue to put off new ones. Aznavour's character is way too affectless and defeated for American audiences (in particular), and venturing out of the isolation and passivity of getting-by is a disaster for the already traumatized Charlie. "Continue to keep your head down" is a message exceptionally alien to Americans. Our movies so often show nebbish non-entities rising to challenges (whether superheroes stripping off their everyday disguises or the mild-manner café owner in "A History of Violence" who reveals himself to be "so good at killing people" or Dustin Hoffman's turn to violence in "Straw Dogs," etc., etc.). We have (or at least celebrate) a "can-do" attitude. (How many sports movies about underdogs show the overdogs grinding the underdogs into the dust? even the few in which the overdogs win (such as "Mystery, Alaska," don't.) Great movies in which the protagonists don't rise to overcome challenges (Vertigo, The Conversation) usually fail at the box office.* (Yeah, yeah, "Tirez sur le pianiste" failed at the French box office, too. Despite a number of defeats, more than a few French statesmen have delusions of grandeur and a record of meddling in their former colonies in Africa that is almost as dismal as American interventions in Latin America... and first financing then taking over from the French defeated at Dienbenphu...).

I don't know how much Truffaut saw himself as Charlie, though there is more than a passing resemblance of Truffaut and Aznavour, and I don't think that Truffaut felt as self-confident in everyday life as he did in directing films. (In that he was being applauded for "The 400 Blows" (which was presented as at least somewhat autobiographical), perhaps Truffaut felt more like Edourad and in danger of falling into being like Charlie?)

I also don't know to what extent the malaise of the Algerian war for independence affected the mood of "Tirez sur le pianiste", especially in that in some ways the movie has an exuberance in the young director playing with the medium (and in bringing to the screen in a dramatic role, the popular French singer Charles Aznavour). (Truffaut expressed opposition to continuing to oppose Algerian Independence, but was not very political... which was clearly better than Godard's loopy enthusiasms, IMO.)

There is still plenty to talk about in "Tirez sur le pianiste," and I'd really like to reassemble the class in which I first saw it and discuss how it looks to us now. (Or while fantasizing the impossible, to time-travel back an listen to our discussion then. Or, more feasibly, to find the paper I wrote then on the first three Truffaut movies.)

---

The Fox-Lorber DVD has an excellent transfer (what seems underlit was in the original). It includes trailers for 8 Truffaut movies, but no other extras.

---

* Heroes dying in a tsunami of bullets is less of an obstacle, seemingly, as in The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, They Live By Night, High Sierra, and many more.

---

It would be difficult to argue that this is a French find, in that I saw the film twice decades ago (and wrote something about it then), but Barbara is inclusive and/or indulgent a writeoff co-ordinator, and there is no question that what I've reviewed is very French. For other contributions to her writeoff, see http://www.epinions.com/content_229814210180.

©2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD