Major themes

Anyway, the ending struck me as being about someone escaping real life through art.

Well the only thing he has left in his real life is his art and his art is playing a HonkyTonk Piano in a cheap bar. A lot like Tom Neal in the beginning of Detour.

Shoot the Piano Player is on a critical level about the personal integrity of an artist. Like as Edward Saroyan, great concert pianist, his character is a hack simply where he is because his wife slept with his backer whereas as a honkytonk anoymous pianist, he's truly being himself and uncompromised or so he thinks.

The film is about crime films, films noir since it's the spirit of New Wave films to talk about the cinema. So you have parodies of gangster films and cliches. Much of the humour comes from the fact that the hitmen are really funny jokers who nonetheless also kill. That the heroine likes to use expletives while Charlie is poker-faced. So the film is simultaneously a genre film, a crime-thriller, a gangster film, a film noir and a critique and deconstruction of that genre by changing the tone, the style and the payoff.

The main theme is loneliness, solitude, trying to and generally failing to deal with that. That's a key Truffaut theme.


"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes

I agree with those who have noted references to genres, particularly film noir of the forties and fifties. But I do not think that is its major feature, as it were. The primary theme is alienation, without question, and one cannot miss that life feels to the main character like he had no real control over events. Thus one must add chance and the unexpected to the mix.

Another noteworthy element is the treatment of Charlie's own art. I think Truffaut, like many other filmmakers, is very interested in the personal connection they have to their own art and craft, where that connection places them and affects their own search for more general meaning. But for probably a number of reasons it is "better" to examine some other art form than filmmaking itself. Here we have music and music performance to serve as an analogy. Is there a message, or a metaphor, in his wife's effectively prostituting herself in order to get ahead in the business to what is required to get ahead in the filmmaking business? Perhaps not so much overtly on that point as in the more general sense of satisfaction in one's work. By that I mean whatever benefit Charles received in his career as Saroyan, not only did not hold up as it were. It was not as real as his direct and personal connection to the sheer act of playing as the film closes, in a much less auspicious setting, to say the least.

Of course what undermined the connection in his Saroyan days was made brutally clear by Therese, and shown to be not real at all. And later, when Lena more or less assumes that Charlie will want to, and can, go back to his Saroyan levels of success, by his look Charlie shows Lena is missing a good deal of what he had learned from prior experience.

Well, in Lena's defense perhaps one could argue that Therese's death and the reasons for it have led him to learn perhaps the wrong lesson. It of course does not necessarily follow that the specific arc of events that were involved in his Saroyan days as a performer was necessary. We can sense that Charlie is not only not sure he wants to return to that level of success. I think he doubts that he could, at least not without hte kind of help that Therese provided for him. But again, we do not know that to be the case.

Finally the whole dynamic of having two separate identities is an obvious theme. Other examples in film range from Kim Novak's character in Vertigo to Viggo Mortenson's in A History of Violence. What is common to them, I think, is in some cases more overt than in others, Mortenson's performance being a fairly overt one exploring how the differences on those characters raise questions of identity and true meaning. Aznavour's performance by comparison on the surface seems to suggest that Edouardo and Charlie in fact are personas that are not all that different. But then recall the photography sessions, the interviews, that followed Schmeel's gentle accusation that he is not giving the press enough to work with, meaning he has been too reticent. In them we see Edouardo presenting a subtly different face, in fact arguably not all that subtly, and clearly attributable to his comfort as well as the expectations of his audience, in terms of what is possible for someone in Saroyan's place.

Charlie by comparison is expected to be withdrawn and timid, and lives up to those expectations.

I suppose the film is not the most coherent film, as a bit of criticism here. But it deserves credit for taking risks, and I suppose that in itself is also a theme. The two deaths and the way the film takes for granted that his brothers are stuck in a life of crime could be grindingly nihilistic, and certainly fatalistic. Yet Charlie keeps on going, with the help in large part of his music. And it should be noted the caring of others around him.