Shoot the Piano Player (1960, French)

I’m fairly sure that Shoot the Piano Player is Truffaut’s idea of an action movie. In this, his fourth film, he plays with genre in the same way that he plays with camera tricks and sound effects – and as much as I can see how influential his work and the French New Wave in general were on cinema, I just can’t bring myself to care too much about the films and their characters. I prefer proto-New Waver Jean-Pierre Melville’s more straightforward gangsters and louts. Bob and Silien at least feel like real characters, not just compendiums of tics and happenstance, figures to show off around. And while Melville’s films are in many ways just as stylized as Truffaut’s and Godard’s, they retain stronger ties to classic European drama (in addition to early American noir). I guess this is one of those rare instances where I like the traditional more than I do the novel. One of these days, I’ll quit trying to like the French New Wave.