French New Wave films are an area that I’ve woefully overlooked.
While I’ve seen a handful — La Jetée, Bob le Flambeur, Alphaville, and (thanks to film club) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — I haven’t seen the essential movies.
(Curiously, one list of New Wave films included François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the movie, but don’t consider it New Wave.)
So much has been written about the New Wave and Shoot the Piano Player that it doesn’t make sense to rehash things. But a few thoughts came to mind while watching the movie and an accompanying interview with Truffaut from 1965.
During the chase at the end of the movie, one of the gangsters, Momo (played by Claude Mansard), twirls his pistol before firing a fatal shot. It’s incongruous with the seriousness of the scene.
For me, the pistol twirl was an epiphany in understanding Shoot the Piano Player. I suddenly recognized a connection between this movie and last week’s short, Zorgon.
In both instances, the filmmakers have an appreciation of movies. One was a film-class project that involved getting friends together to demonstrate their filmmaking skills. The other involved someone who’d studied film — and American movies in particular — and wanted to pay homage to those movies but with his own style — or twirl, so to speak.
Truffaut embraced the trappings of an American film noir but blended them with his own film sensibilities. The result is both romantic, humorous, and desperate.