TRUFFAUT - Shoot The Piano Player

Here we have an interesting trifle. I mean that in the sense not of something insignificant, but of something light and tasty, not lacking substance but not possessing a great deal of it, either.

The most striking thing about this movie, besides its spectacular title, is that it isn't what it ought to be. After all, there's a murder, a knife fight, a car chase, a character fleeing from his past and changing his name, a shootout, a flashback, two classic henchmen, an opening scene with a character fleeing for his life down the darkened streets of Paris, and themes of brotherly loyalty tested and ambition cast aside.

And yet, this isn't a noir picture. It's not easily classified, but noir it ain't. The opening flight sets the mood, but mainly because the pursued character runs smack into a light pole and winds up listening to a stranger tell him about learning to love his wife. This bit isn't played for laughs, but it does deflate the serious/dramatic tone the movie might have been about to set. Which is a wise decision, because the movie becomes a story about love and shyness, as much as anything else, and 90 minutes of serious reflection on why a guy is too shy to ask a girl out would be unbearable.

So it's hard to classify, but it's still a Truffaut picture (you can tell because the women have nice legs.) The main character, Charlie Koller (nee Edouard Saroyan), is too timid to even touch a woman he likes, though confusingly, he has a warm and occasionally steamy relationship with the prostitute that watches his kid brother during the day. The running narrative in his head, which takes over to tell the story of his previous life, and the tragic circumstances under which he left it, establishes that he's a neurotic genius unable to ask for what he wants, particularly when he wants something from a woman.

This all leaves him rather unprepared for what happens when his brother bursts into the club where he makes a modest living as a honky-tonk piano player and, after making a scene, asks for his help in protecting him from "them", the 2 gangster pursuers from the opening scene. Charlie doesn't want to help, but does anyway, which marks him and a smitten waitress for abduction later on. Again, we have a pretty noirish setup, but the situation is defused when the gangsters seem unable to foresee the obvious: they allow Lena, the waitress, to sit in the front seat, where she steps on the gas. The car speeds, the traffic cops stop it, and Lena and Charlie simply walk away from their kidnapping. In another movie, this might seem like quick thinking on Lena's part; here, it seems like another example of the idiot gangsters being idiots.

But it's still very entertaining, and this perhaps more than anything else is what identifies Shoot The Piano Player as first-class Truffaut.

BERGMAN - The Seventh Seal

Much has been said about The Seventh Seal, and I'm not likely in this brief essay to say anything new. That's pretty much true of everything I'm going to be writing about for this project, but nothing can surpass The Seventh Seal in terms of sheer aptitude for undergraduate term paper dissection. The movie is a festival of symbols and metaphors and allegorical constructs, and it almost seems so stuffed with them that it could be reviewed with an Excel chart.

So instead of analyzing the symbolism of the movie, I'd like instead to investigate a question: two days after the death of Ingmar Bergman, what does his most well-known movie have to tell us about his thoughts on life and its extinguishment?

To begin with, the character of Death is not, as could easily have been the case, a sombre spectral nightmare. True, whenever Death appears on the scene, all ambient noise disappears, and is replaced by a sometimes deafening stillness. Wearing a black robe, and made up to be as pale as possible, Death is initially fearsome. And uttering lines like, "I am unknowing," the character can be very serious.

But there is an almost lighthearted quality to the banter he exchanges with the Knight, Antonius Block, over the chessboard. He clearly enjoys the duel, and comes to respect and indulge Block, at one point even expressing his happiness that Block was able to accomplish something in the extra time he was afforded as a result of the chess match.

Death is therefore humanized. He pops out of shadows, or stalks characters as they pass into the frame, and never exhibits any supernatural trickery whatsoever. He is simply an inevitability, a guy in a robe with a job to do.

The real villain is not Death. At one point, in an amazing scene in a church, Block confesses to Death, mistaking him for a monk. "We must make an idol out of our fear, and call it God," laments the knight.

And indeed, God is never present in the film, except as a name given to horror. Such as a fascinating and ghoulish procession of monks and the penitent, all of them stumbling under their heavy burdens and whipping each other and themselves, a procession so holy that all entertainment stops when they approach, and all present drop to one knee and pray as they pass (except the world-weary-and-wise knight and his squire).

Throughout the film, God is remarkable by His absence, as death brutally seizes whole populations and the priests can do nothing but profit. As people die and others grow more afraid, the church gets richer and more powerful. Death, hope, God can all be exploited to inspire fear, the true root of suffering.

And in the end, finally, Death comes for everyone. He enters a room filled with all the main characters, and they stand to greet him. None are afraid, because Death is not something to fear; there is no point. Fear is fearsome, death is simply what happens at the end of a life.

First post!

Ingmar Bergman died today. Death, he is quoted as saying in his NYT obituary, is "a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about."

So maybe being inspired by his death to learn more about classic cinema would be fitting, rather than ghoulish.