UK-based rara-avians may be interested to know that
Truffaut's film of Goodis's _Down There_ is airing tomorrow
night on BBC Knowledge.
ED
(here's the blurb from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/knowledge/languages/kino/index.shtml)
Foreign Language Cinema Classics Thursday 23th November 2000,
10:30pm
Tirez sur le pianiste
France 1960 Directed by Fran篩s Truffaut
This review is written by Leslie Felperin, Deputy Editor of
Sight and Sound magazine.
Fran篩s Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste, Shoot the Pianist,
offers a welcome opportunity to acquaint yourself, or
reacquaint yourself as the case may be, with this
now-underrated director's charms. Truffaut was one of the
most gifted and influential auteurs to emerge from the French
New Wave. But sadly, most mainstream movie fans my age or
younger only know Fran篩s Truffaut as that French scientist
guy at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He is
also rather undervalued by critics and cineastes today.
<<Plot>> Based on David Goodis' dimestore schlock
novel Down There, Shoot the Pianist tells the story of
Charlie Kohler, a once-famous concert pianist played by
singer-songwriter Charles Aznavour.
After the death of his wife, played in flashback by Nicole
Berger, he takes to tickling the ivories in a honky-tonk
Paris saloon. Shy and haunted, Charlie spends most of his
time alone but his solitude is broken by the re-appearance of
his long-estranged brother, on the run from two gangster
colleagues. At the same time he falls in love with a waitress
named Lena, played by fragile-featured Marie Dubois.
<<French New Wave>> In typical New Wave style,
Truffaut delights in playing about with genre, with sudden
shifts in tone and peculiar visual digressions. Dashes of
slapstick, tragedy and romance flicker in and out of the
film.
For example, one sequence features a time-fractured interlude
showing Charlie and Lena lolling in bed. (I think this is one
of the most romantic post-coital scenes ever committed to
celluloid.) In another scene with the comical but deadly
gangsters there is a flash cut to a wonderful
silent-film-style gag.
All these delicious contradictions are captured perfectly in
the theme-tune, composed by Georges Delerue who also did the
score for Jules et Jim. The title song here is a jaunty
little number tugged down to melancholy by a minor-key
moroseness. Incidentally, Aznavour doesn't actually play the
piano in the movie, although he fakes it brilliantly.
<<Director and cinematographer>> Shoot the
Pianist was made in 1960 between two of Truffaut's best-known
films, his autobiographical debut, The 400 Blows, and the
m鮡ge à ´rois classic Jules et Jim. It's a tribute to all the
kiss-kiss-bang-bang B-movies Truffaut championed in his film
criticism.
Shoot the Pianist is also a showcase for the work of another
New Wave talent, cinematographer Raoul Coutard. He
collaborated with Truffaut and Godard on much of their early
work, including Godard's Breathless, which Truffaut
co-wrote.
Coutard played a key role in the signature visual style of
the movement: the handheld immediacy, the fragmentary
jump-cut style, and the unusual framing. Always the inventor,
in Shoot the Pianist he uses a rare widescreen format,
Dyaliscope. His tightly held tracking shot of Lena running
through the snow at the end of the film makes this
penultimate scene a true heartbreaker.
<<Conclusion>> Shoot the Pianist wasn't
especially well received by the critics when it first came
out and the masochistic self-sacrifice of the female
characters looks rather dated and embarrassing now. But in
the end, it's a tender and charming work. You can forgive its
faults for its flashes of brilliance, like the fabulous
sequence where a long drive, shot through a windscreen, is
collapsed into the space of a song. Don't shoot down
Truffaut's reputation until you've seen Shoot the
Pianist.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Nov 2000 EST