Shoot the Piano Player. Charles Aznavour is the male Edith Piaf of France. Like Piaf, he is slight, darkly sad-eyed, and sings and looks as if he were in mourning for his life. In this movie, Aznavour sings nary a note. He plays Charlie Koller, a shy honky-tonk piano tinkler in a demimonde bistro, who has a great deal to be mournful about.
In flashback, it develops that Charlie was a famed concert pianist whose wife (Nicole Berger) made his career by sleeping with his concert manager. When Charlie is unable to forgive her, she commits suicide, and his career hits the skids. Charlie's present is no happier than his past. A couple of his brothers, both criminals, entangle him in a caper, and though Charlie escapes with his life, gunmen riddle his lovely and adoring mistress (Marie du Bois). At film's end, Charlie is back at the bistro, and the moral, if any, seems to be that shooting the piano player might, at least, put the poor devil out of his misery.
Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover, Piano Player suggests that the New Wave is carrying its own logic to absurdity. Together with the Neo-Realist school of French fiction led by Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (TIME, July 20), the New Wave set out to give the "object" its due. In Piano Player, things—the honky-tonk piano, the hero's brass bed, an auto careening through the night—are vibrantly and almost independently alive, and man has become the lifeless inanimate object, draped over this brilliantly animated photoscape with the limp surrealistic pointlessness of one of Dali's melting watches.