Crime and mystery surrounding Truffaut’s Pianist

Résumé

Ahead of its time, Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Pianist) is a 1960 French film, which can be included in the film noir genre, although it was made in the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague by François Truffaut, also co-author of the screenplay with Marcel Moussy, from David Goodis’ contemporary crime novel Down There. It is a quite free adaptation which was produced by Pierre Braunberger for Les Films de La Pléiade. In this film noir with notes of comedy, drama and romance, the adventures of the mysterious pianist Charlie Kohler are narrated when he finds himself unintentionally involved in the criminal underworld and in a new love passion. Intended tribute of the director to the classic American and European film noir, in this cinematographic work, however, he proceeds to an experimental juxtaposition of styles, since the filmmaker mixes genres and emotions, leading us from suspense to comic dialogues and flashbacks into the melodramatic past of the pianist. Truffaut enjoys himself and us by multiplying the surprises and the digressions. In fact, the crime and mystery intrigue that takes place throughout the film and actively participates in its construction serves, above all, as a pretext for the approach to the main theme of Truffaut’s cinematography: love and the complexity of human relations. Hence the fascination that this film continues to exert with cinema lovers.