The first thing we see in Francois Truffaut’s second film, Shoot the Piano Player, is the inside of a piano, playing a saturnine little ditty, but we will never see the insides of the melancholic man who is playing the tune. Like all doomed heroes of the French New Wave, his face is all business, hiding the giddiness and sexual proclivity that he no doubt holds in abundance under a rough exterior.

This man is Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), a low income piano player at a small bar and dancehall with a younger brother at home and an older brother in trouble. While playing his piano one night, Charlie’s older brother, Chico, runs in asking him to help him evade two hoods he has scammed. Charlie says no, but in a clinch, slows the hoods down. This small action sets the two gangsters on Charlie’s trail, while all he wants to do is start a new life with barmaid Lena (Marie Dubois). The plot gets shifty in the middle, calling on a long flashback to Charlie’s first marriage to Therese (Nicole Berger) where we also learn that Charlie’s real name is Edouard Saroyan, and is in fact an infamous piano player. It all ends with Charlie and his two brothers fighting off the two gangsters in a farmhouse, to finally get their little brother back.

In most French New Wave films, the story is male-centric, but the world inhabited is fully feminine. Truffaut, often eclipsed by the omnipresent talent of Godard, breaks a lot of rules that were accepted at the time. Consider Clarisse (Michèle Mercier), a prostitute who lives next door to Charlie and his young brother, Fido. For all intents and purposes, Clarisse is Charlie’s wife: she has sex with Charlie almost nightly, takes care of Fido during the day and serves as Charlie’s only palpable emotional connection, until Lena arrives. When prostitutes were often only allowed in negative light, in both American and foreign films, Clarisse is seen as a truly good person when all is said and done.

Perceivably, then, we can look at Lena as the person invading this life. Although she gives Charlie courage and talks about dreamy love with him in bed (the sequence is deftly shot by Raoul Coutard), she also brings upon Charlie’s criminal side and leaves him at the house where the intense finale takes place. In the middle of these two women is Charlie, who seems so content at his little piano and going home to his little brother. At one point, Chico says that Charlie should be playing a grand piano, which he did often while married to Therese. What we realize, but poor Chico doesn’t, is that his intensity, his spirit has been crushed by the violent end of his marriage. And Lena’s shimmer of hope is his double-edged sword: he finds his spirit again but at a price that anyone would be reluctant to take up.

Shoot the Piano Player came out in 1960, the same year as Godard’s classic Breathless. These two films, more than any others, seem to be the pinpoints of the French New Wave’s obsession with tweaking the ideals of Hollywood gangster films (Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock references are strewn all over both films). But one can’t help but be enthralled by the revolutionary clemency and go-for-broke energy that films like this give off, in the face off much constructed frameworks. Like Charlie only being able to let his real feelings out through that little crate piano, films like this remind us of our love for film and the possibilities within even the most bare and irreverent stories.

The DVD includes a scholarly commentary track plus a second disc of interviews, documentary excerpts, an audio essy on the film's music, and Dubois' screen test footage.

Aka Tirez sur le pianiste.