CULT MOVIE
Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Pianist, France, 1960, 92’)
by François Truffaut
with Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier.
A loser pianist, a failed marriage, pursuits, kidnaps, escapes, fights, love,
deaths. And an impressive Charles Aznavour, too. Truffaut says: “with
this film I’d like to make women weep and men laugh”. A fascinating,
empowering film.
An adaptation of David Goodis’s noir novel Down There,
this is Truffaut’s second feature film, following Les quatre
cents coups (The Four Hundred Blows)
and preceding Jules et Jim. A pop cult tribute to
American B-movies, a mixture of action and melodrama, this is a film that
has not been screened in Italy for many years: in its rarity it is therefore
a sample of Truffaut’s cinema, exploring the complex territories of
feelings, passion, and boundless love, as well as of desire, and of human
efforts to cope with everyday life so as to try and be happy. Truffaut faces
such human forces by means of some of his obsessions and likings, such as
storming, melodramatic relationships, the wild urges of the human heart, but
also literature and epistolary writing, and the fixations and manias of his
typical characters.
The copy to be screened at Bergamo Film Meeting is a new one, made from a
restored negative. Along with seven other films, it will be part of a retrospective
entitled “François Truffaut. The Pleasure of the Gaze”
and distributed by Lab 80 Film. In cooperation with Cineteca Italiana, Milan.
