Shoot the Piano Player is a film that loves cinema and is not so sure about life. Every angle in this brilliant homage to gangster film and melodrama is cut to a jarred sensibility: Raoul Coutard's cinematography is the visual equivalent of the atonal Georges Delerue piano piece that haunts with its false jollity. Charles Aznavour is the embodiment of the twentieth-century anti-hero, a former concert pianist hiding from the world in a Paris honky-tonk where his good intentions cannot harm anyone. But a woman's love and gangsters from some B-film come to draw Charlie back into life. The light is blinding. Truffaut called his second feature "a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B-films from which I learned so much°.Above all, I was looking for the explosion of a genre (the detective film) by mixing genres°"