Tirez sur le pianiste (1960)

Tirez sur le pianiste is a French thriller film first released in 1960, directed by François Truffaut.  The film is based on a novel by David Goodis and stars Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier and Jean-Jacques Aslanian.  It has also been released under the title: Shoot the piano player.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Who would think that Charlie Kohler, a timid piano player in a nondescript little bar, was once a great concert pianist?  Charlie has good reasons for burying his past, but painful memories resurface when his brother Chico pays him an unexpected visit.  Charlie is unconcerned when he hears that his two older brothers are being harassed by some violent crooks.  His only interest at the present is Lena, the attractive young barmaid he has fallen in love with.  When he learns that his boss has betrayed him to Chico’s gangster enemies, Charlie confronts him and, in a violent tussle, ends up stabbing him to death.  Meanwhile, Charlie’s youngest brother is kidnapped by the crooks.  Accepting that his fate is sealed, Charlie takes flight and hides out with his brothers at a remote country house.  Then the crooks turn up, intent on revenge...

After the staggering success of his first film, Les 400 coups (1959), director François Truffaut tackled its follow-up with a mix of trepidation and creative release.  Partly to indulge his passion for American crime novels, but also to counter criticism that his cinema was parochial and opportunistic, Truffaut decided that his second film should have an American rather than a French feel.  He had recently read David Goodis’s novel Down There (released in France under the title Tirez sur le pianiste) and was so enthused that he persuaded producer Pierre Braunberger to buy the rights so that he could adapt it.  What Truffaut delivered was a superlative pastiche of the American film noir gangster film, with all the familiar noir motifs (including the extended flashback and the internal monologue), seasoned with a hint of tongue-in-cheek parody and one or two musical digressions.  Although it was not a commercial success on its first release (it performed far better in the United States than in France), Tirez sur le pianiste is now considered one of Truffaut’s most important films.  It is certainly his most experimental and original work, the one film in his oeuvre that truly lives up to the revolutionary reputation of the French New Wave.

You have to watch Les 400 coups and Tirez sur le pianiste back-to-back to see just how much more sophisticated and visually exciting the latter film is.  Engaging as it is, Truffaut’s first film feels more like ancien régime than nouvelle vague, so closely does it adhere to the old filmmaking conventions of the 1950s.  By contrast, his second offers true cinematic innovation - an intoxicating mélange of genres that employs a diverse range of lighting and camera techniques to match the constantly changing mood and pace of the film. In the thriller sequences, the film pays homage to classic American film noir with deep focus photography and expressionistic lighting; shallow focus is used in the more reflective, romantic scenes, to suggest disconnection between the protagonists and the world around them; a more naturalistic approach is used for the banal scenes of everyday experience; and, for the dramatic denouement, the cinematography acquires an unreal, fairytale-like quality, a Cocteau-esque lyricism which beautifully counterpoints the menace of the gangster shootout.  These stylistic shifts are so subtly rendered, so carefully aligned with the narrative, that you hardly notice them when watching the film for the first time.  It is fair to say that cinematographer Raoul Coutard brings as much to the film as its director.  It was Coutard’s groundbreaking work on Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) which led Truffaut to hire him for Tirez sur le pianiste.  A natural-born rebel with a genius for innovation and a frequent collaborator of Godard and Truffaut, Coutard was one of the great creative forces behind the French New Wave, although his contribution is often overlooked.   Would we still be singing the praises of Jules et Jim, Lola, Le Mépris and Pierrot le fou if Raoul Coutard had not been there guiding the photography?  The same can also be said of Georges Delerue, the composer who brought a sharper poetic resonance and emotional truth to the films of la Nouvelle Vague; his work on Tirez sur le pianiste is one of his best compositions. 

Headlining a distinguished cast is France’s answer to Frank Sinatra, Charles Aznavour.   It was on seeing Aznavour in George Franju’s La Tête contre les murs (1959) that Truffaut saw his potential as an actor and offered him the lead in his second film, the part of the titular piano player.  Truffaut’s main motivation for choosing the Armenian born actor was because he wanted the main character to look completely un-French, to emphasise the ambiguity of the film’s location.  The other reason why Aznavour was a perfect casting choice is his talent for conveying his inner feelings without surface emotionalism.  The outward timidity and fragility of his portrayal belies the resilience and courage that lies within.  Such is the authenticity that Aznavour  brings to his performances that we completely forget he is also a superstar singer - we see only the character he is playing on the screen.  

For the part of Aznavour’s ill-fated girlfriend Lena, Truffaut cast the completely unknown Claudine Huzé and gave her the name by which she is now better known, Marie Dubois.  Again, this was an inspired piece of casting, for not only is Dubois a charismatic, photogenic young actress (of the kind for which Truffaut had a particular weakness), but she also matches Aznavour’s skill for playing strong, believable characters with an aura of tragic vulnerability.  The impressive supporting cast includes some notable names - Albert Rémy, who had played Antoine Doinel’s father in Les 400 coups, Nicole Berger, the star of Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Blé en herbe (1954) (who died tragically young in a road accident a few years later) and Michèle Mercier, who would later find enduring fame through the Angélique films of the late 1960s.  It was Truffaut’s refusal to excise a shot in which Mercier flashes her substantial breasts that caused difficulties with the censor and earned the film its 18 certification in France.  (The director did however remove a shot in which the gangsters ran over a small cat.)

Tirez sur le pianiste is often considered one of Truffaut’s least typical films, yet it is undoubtedly among his finest, if only for the audacity with which it fractures the cinematic conventions of the time.  The film differs from the director’s subsequent noir-like thrillers - La Mariée était en noir (1967) and Vivement dimanche! (1983) - by virtue of the fact that the parodic vein is much more subtle and the characters more convincingly drawn.  With its allusions to amour fou, the film has more in common with Truffaut’s tragic romances, Jules et Jim (1962) and La Peau douce (1964), without the melodramatic excesses of these films.  It is here that we encounter Truffaut’s best gag - a gangster’s mother dropping dead when he swears on her life - and also his most visually inspired denouement.  But what most sets Tirez sur le pianiste apart and makes it one of the great films of the French New Wave is that it constantly takes us by surprise.  If only audiences and critics had responded more favourably to the film when it first came out, Truffaut may have been encouraged to take far greater risks in his subsequent career, instead of gravitating to the kind of crowd-pleasing conformity that he railed against when he was a firebrand critic.

© James Travers 2011

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