Shoot the Piano Player is a film that loves the 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, who resembles the young film critic turned filmmaker Truffaut, is the embodiment of a twentieth-century anti-hero as a former concert pianist hiding from the world in a Paris honky-tonk where his good intentions cannot harm anyone. Now Charlie has no intentions. But a woman's love and gangsters from some B film come to draw Charlie back into life. The light is blinding. Rarely have two artists merged visions so perfectly in one film: Coutard's camerawork is as improbably beautiful as Truffaut's story is beautifully improbable.