Beautiful, moving film.

Absolutely the worst movie.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Francois Truffaut's second feature, TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE ("Shoot the Piano Player") is ostensibly an adaptation of a gritty noir crime novel by David Goodis. As the film opens, we see Chico (Albert Rémy) running through the dark streets of Paris from an unseen assailant. Chico enters a bar where his brother Charlie (Charles Aznavour) works playing piano in the evenings to dancing patrons. The one brother begs the other for help, "I've got to elude two criminals I scammed out of money," says Chico. Charlie is reluctant to get involved in his brother's sordid affairs, but he ends up doing that anyway, along with the bar's waitress Lena (Marie Dubois). As romance blossoms between Charlie and Lena, we flash back to an earlier time in his life when he was an aspiring concert pianist, a career path that was ultimately abandoned after tragic circumstances.Truffaut had made a big splash with his debut LES 400 COUPS ("The 400 Blows") a year earlier in 1959, which inaugurated the French New Wave with its innovations and flaunting of rules that defied the staid French filmmaking tradition of the preceding years. Still, LES 400 COUPS doesn't seem particularly disruptive to audiences today. It is with TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE that we find truly zany and fearless storytelling. The jump cuts, voiceovers, sexual frankness, and critique of the new consumerist society make it readily comparable to the early work of Truffaut's friend Jean-Luc Godard, as does the use of a crime novel as a mere plot skeleton around which the filmmaker could introduce his own concerns.In fact, the wildly swinging tone of the film is jarring. One minute it's jovial: when Charlie and Lena are kidnapped by the two men pursuing Chico, instead of a realistically threatening scene the four of them crack jokes like old pals. And yet at other points the film is full of true pathos: death, failed relationships, shattered dreams.Charles Aznavour was a legendary French crooner. (In fact, he still is, still giving concerts as I write this as he approaches a hundred.) Singers don't always make good actors, but here Aznavour is brilliant. Diverging from the source material, Truffaut choose to make Charlie introverted and full of self-doubt, and Aznavour's expressions and gestures perfectly capture this sympathetic character.While my own tastes in the French New Wave run to Godard more than Truffaut, I enjoyed this film. A lot of the humour is still effective today. With the intertwined plots of fleeing from criminals, budding romance, and flashback to days of yore, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER seems to have a lot more than its merely 81-minute running time.

Tragic, unconventional, non-chronological told love story in which the protagonist Charlie loses two girlfriends under fateful circumstances, partly caused by him. The occasionally funny and always entertaining film transform the American novel Down There and it's noir atmosphere into a french masterpiece that exposes the "romance and beauty between the lines" (Kael in a different context). It centers around the titular piano player who's shyness, love for women and art, as well as his final powerlessness reflect not only the writer and director Truffaut, but also our own lives. It's his second picture and maybe with the, partly failed, exception of Jules and Jim his last real attempt at the Godard-esque deconstruction of film and his genres, after which he leaned more, and sometimes too much so, to the classical approach of his great idol Hitchcock. Nevertheless do I admire Truffauts more grounded style, which fits his striving for succession of Renoirs humanistic legacy. In Shoot the Piano Player the combination between youthful experimenting with genre and form, and the not quite polished attempt at an effective emotional drama, perfectly fit the story to create a masterpiece.

Francois Truffaut's follow up to The 400 Blows was a muscular yet whimsical and freewheeling homage to the Hollywood gangster films.Charles Aznavour was once a famous concert pianist playing as Edouard Saroyan but since his wife's death has changed his name to Charlie Kohler and plays in a dive bar.Charlie takes care of his younger brother Fido, is friendly with a prostitute in the same apartment block and slowly started a relationship with Lena a co-worker in the bar who knows about his previous life.This desolate existence is shattered when his brother Richard turns up from the countryside as he is being chased by gangsters who he with his other brother they have double crossed.Charlie has to enter a dangerous real world as he realises Fido's life is in danger. Although Charlie's life is melancholic there is a a lot of sweetness, comedy and romance in this film before it gets darker as thuggery takes centre stage.Like the emerging French new wave the film does not fit one genre, even at one point feeling like an art house picture as we are transported to Charlie's life as a concert pianist.A hugely enjoyable wild ride, a film whose very title has become famous and Aznavour is perfect casting as Charlie.

Charlie Kohler, a pianist at a Parisian dive, lives in obscurity. As the story begins, he is visited by one of his brothers, Chico, who is being followed by two gangsters that want to talk to him about the money he took from them. Naturally, Charlie becomes also a target for these characters who figure they can get to Chico through his brother.A loner, Charlie lives alone with his younger brother Fido. His neighbor is an attractive prostitute, Clarissa, that hangs around in the place where Charlie plays. Lena, a shy woman that also works there, likes Charlie. The attraction is there but neither Charlie or Lena make the right move to consummate what they feel for one another. We watch them go into the empty Parisian streets late at night but nothing happens between them, until Clarissa points to her friend that Lena cares for him.As Charlie and Lena begin to get intimate, Charlie thinks about another life he had with Therese. He was an aspiring the classic concert Edoard Saroyan, an artist with a fine future. What he is not aware of is the sacrifice Therese underwent in order to get him into the spotlight. The impresario Lars Schmeel, he learns, knew Therese in more intimate ways. Her sacrifice was what took Edoard to a fame that was, in part, due not to his talent, but as someone's desire to possess something that was his. Therese pays dearly for her actions.The gangsters finally get to Charlie by kidnapping Fido after school and taking him to the place where Chico and Richard Saroyan are hiding. Knowing that Clint, the bar tender's betrayal proves fatal as Charlie wants to avenge his telling his brother's chasers about their whereabouts. Lena, borrows the landlady's car to go after the criminals; in the end, Charlie stands alone as Lena is killed during a shootout.The second film by Francois Truffaut was a memorable one. Not having seen it for quite some time, we took a chance to do so when it showed up on a classic film channel recently. The film appears to have been restored with care. We loved Raoul Coutard's brilliant black and white cinematography. Taking the camera to the streets was a trade mark of the New Wave filmmakers, Truffaut accomplishes an incredible atmosphere by the tour he gives us of those out of the way places of Paris where he sets the action. The film is based on a novel by David Goodis. A lot of French creators saw in this native American pulp writing a good source in which to base their work.Charles Aznavour plays the double role of Charlie/Edoard with an economy of gestures. Yet, both men being portrayed in the film show this man could have been a natural for the cinema, had he decided to take more roles instead of a splendid career as a singer. Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, and Michelle Mercier are seen as Lena, Therese and Clarissa, respectively. Albert Remy was excellent as Chico.