"Shoot The Piano Player", Dir: François Truffaut, 1957

To start 2026 and after a long break from posting personal film reviews (on a site that is perhaps doomed to obsolescence because it's name refers to a period most people would prefer to forget) and I decided to kick off 2026 with a classic Francois Truffaut film from 1957, "Tirez Sur Le Pianiste" (Eng: "Shoot The Piano Player") prompted mainly by a recent trawl of songs performed by Charles Aznavour to be found on YouTube. Throughout the 1950's and 60's Charles Aznavour was in demand as an actor in parallel with a successful career as a singer, although in this film he is not required to sing, apart from during a brief post-coital moment at the film's midpoint and it's his rather dour expression resulting from his distinctive facial features that sets the tone for this tragi-comic slash film-noir that opens with his down-at-heel piano player bashing out jolly tunes in deadpan for the clientele of a seedy cafe.

I've pointed out the French New Wave's admiration of the film noir genre in previous posts and Truffaut in particular was very influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's darkly humorous approach to the macabre subjects of film noir.

I have actually watched the film before (on Criterion Channel) and have a hazy memory of the first act which bookends a second act comprising of an expository flashback before the final act set in the same time frame as the first act. Not a particularly unusual structure for a film but watching it in its entirety again I can see why it perhaps didn't quite hang together for me the first time around, being something of a playful "exercise in style", as it switches genres between acts. The first act feels like a romantic comedy of errors where Aznavour's "Charlie Koller" is persuaded to make a romantic advance to the cafe's young waitress "Léna" (Marie Dubois) by his brutish married boss who also has his eye on her. Léna is attracted to Charlie but waits for him to make the first move and when he offers to walk her home after work he loses his nerve and withdraws, while agreeing to accompanying her to her apartment. Instead he later finds solace in the arms of a prostitute who operates from a room adjacent to his in the typically Parisian garret where he lives, "Clarisse" (Michèle Mercier), a regular at the same cafe and who makes it very obvious that she is attracted to him besides acting as a surrogate mother to his much younger brother, "Fido", with whom he shares his apartment.

Mercier's role in the film is quite small and yet impactful as only the second acting role in her film career, but it is also memorable, leading her to rival the late Brigitte Bardot as a legendary actress and screen beauty. The film's second act reveals in flashback the reasons for Charlie's wretched predicament in life as a talented musician making do in a seedy dive. The transition to this act occurs via the device of a poster advertising a performance by "Edouard Saroyan" with a likeness of "Charlie Koller" next to it in Léna's flat, which she has kept in her belief that "Charlie Koller" and "Edouard Saroyan" are one and the same person. The second act opens with "Edouard Saroyan" (Aznavour) in a restaurant flirting with the attractive waitress, "Thérèse" (Nicole Berger), without the hesitation that marked his introverted personality earlier on, but her charms are also being noticed by someone else at a nearby table, "Lars Schmeel" (Claude Heymann) , an entertainment impressario. Edouard wastes no time in proposing to Therese and before long they are happily married, but Schmeel is not done and makes a move on Edouard, offering to represent him as a musician and the promise of a lucrative career. However, at the peak of Edouard's professional success as a concert pianist, Therese reveals that she agreed to spending one night with Schmeel in exchange for ensuring both her and Edouard's future. Horrified and filled with remorse for this betrayal, she throws herself out of a hotel window to her death below. Edouard, ruined financially and professionally, reshapes his life as "Charlie Koller" to separate himself from the tragedy and this forms the opening of the film's third act. Truffaut employs a linking or bridging narrative of the first and last acts in the form of two jovial career criminals who are seeking redress after being double-crossed in a shady business deal by the brutish cafe owner who employs Charlie, and Charlie's (or now, Edouard's) two small-time criminal Saroyan brothers. They decide to kidnap "Fido" to use him as a hostage in order to lure Charlie to his old family home in the French Alps where his Saroyan brothers are hiding out. At this point it becomes clear that Edouard's musical ability had offered an escape from poverty and the criminality of his brothers, but this past hangs like a shadow over his life. Charlie/Edouard and Lena, now in a relationship, make a pact to leave the cafe for good and visit the cafe to deliver the news. This doesn't go down well with his boss, who is driven into a fit of jealous rage, and ends when Charlie accidentally kills him during a tussle.

Interestingly, Truffaut's depiction of the two criminals who kidnap "Fido" as a couple of jokers is the opposite of the film-noir stereotype of brutish thugs, which makes them all the more menacing as they hide their psychopathic tendencies under a veneer of crude jokes and banal observations.

Edouard and Léna, now effectively on the run for murder, are tipped off by Clarisse that Fido has been kidnapped and that the kidnappers are headed toward the French Alps and the Saroyan family home. In hot pursuit they gain an advantage as the kidnapper's car has broken down half way and they reach the Saroyan family home ahead of them. The third act takes the form of a shoot-out as the kidnappers try to storm the Saroyan's snow-bound hideout and feels very much in the vein of a film noir. On this second viewing it reinforced my sense that Truffaut was deliberately playing with the form of a film noir shoot-out, moving the location from, say, the seedy nocturnal underbelly of cities like New York or Chicago, to a wintery French Alps location. There's an element of comedy as the kidnappers slip and stumble, impeded by the deep snowfall, in their attempts to reach the house and the consequence of this is that Lena is fatally shot as she tries to reach Fido who has slipped from the kidnapper's clutches. This is the second tragedy in Charlie/Edouard's life and the film ends with Charlie/Edouard back in the cafe, deadpan and bashing out a rather melancholic tune on the piano. Truffaut cheats the audience of a neat romantic ending with one that honours its film-noir, pulp fiction origins even if it can often feel like three different films as he plays with genres, but that's why it's interesting. As for the casting, Aznavour was the perfect choice and the only other acting contemporary I can think of who could have fulfilled the role would have been Pierre Etaix since there's something of the tragi-comic clown in both their faces.

"Shoot The Piano Player" Dir: Francois Truffaut, 1957

Criterion Channel