Saw Shoot the Piano Player, a French, black and white, new-wave film about a piano player whose brother is involved somehow with gangsters of robbers or something. Anyway, the piano player gets sucked into this gangster drama after the brother hides out in the piano player's bar for a bit. The piano player has a sad past of faded glory and is undergoing some subtle love affair with a waitress and in an interesting inversion of the usual formula, this romance and drama of faded glory is the focus, while the trenchcoated baddies occupy the background.
These dual pasts of a life of crime and a life of concert performances vie for screen-time via the genres of romance and thriller. Running from bad memories, the piano player is hiding from both of these past lives and spends a lot of screentime not reacting to things. The film is dryly funny in its way. At one point a girlfriend reveals she cheated on him and he just peers at her wooden-faced. Later a gangster swears on his mother's life that his tie is silk. We immediately cut over to an old woman keeling over, clutching her heart. Very silly.
This is a fairly dry film, or at least I wasn't able to engage with it. The genre-clashing games were kind of interesting and I suspect if I were more alert I would have enjoyed it better, but of course the same may be said of many films. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment