Memory Lapse

Movie: Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960) (TCM).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: The Witcher: Dear Friend ... ; Voleth Meir; Family (Netflix). 

I don't usually binge-watch, but when you're down to the last three episodes of a season of a show as entertaining and complicated as The Witcher, it's hard not to sit through all of them at once. I still don't have the backstories of the characters as well sorted out as I might, but I don't have the kind of devotion to the series that its die-hard fans have. Suffice it to say that there's a whole lot about Ciri and Yennefer (and even Geralt) that I don't fully understand, but I'd rather go with the flow of the action than spend my life digging into source material. At least I'm glad that they and my boy Jaskier (who gets a shirtless scene in a season when Geralt mostly stays clad) survived for another season. Too bad about Roach, however. 

Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)

I watched Shoot the Piano Player almost five years ago, according to this blog, and I'm surprised how much of it I had forgotten. Usually I get an occasional déjà vu when I'm rewatching a movie after several years, but there were only a few moments when that happened this time. Is it a sign of age? I like to think instead that it's because this loosey-goosey tragicomedy never quite goes where you're expecting it to, so it's hard to keep its plot turns and unpredictable characters (other than Charles Aznavour's Charlie/Edouard) in mind.   

I'm trying to give Troilus and Cressida its due attention, so I'm making my way through the play slowly, stopping to read the notes in the Arden edition when I feel the need. It's a better play than I remembered, with well-delineated secondary characters. I'm finding its bitter comedy rather bracing, and wonder why it isn't performed more often. The play's cynicism seems like it would have a lot of appeal to contemporary audiences.

Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)

You can tell this is an early French New Wave film because there's plenty of sending up the old way of doing things in movies -- in particular the American crime thriller -- without attempting anything terribly new. For example, at one point the protagonist is sitting up in bed with the woman he has just slept with and tells her to "do it the way they do in the movies," whereupon she covers her exposed breasts by tucking the sheet under her arms. The shifts in tone are astonishing, from slapstick to real violence and back again, which is what we expect of a New Wave classic. But there is nothing truly groundbreaking in Truffaut's storytelling here, the way there was in the feature that immediately preceded Shoot the Piano Player, The 400 Blows (1959), or would be in his next, Jules and Jim (1962). Still, we have a wonderfully engaging performance by Charles Aznavour as the titular pianist, Charlie Kohler aka Edouard Saroyan. We also have a perfectly fitted score by Georges Delerue and cinematography by Raoul Coutard that often betrays Truffaut's love of Alfred Hitchcock. Watching Shoot the Piano Player, it's easy to see why Truffaut was the first person approached to direct Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), with its similar oscillations in tone.