Shoot the Piano Player

After The 400 Blows made him internationally famous at twenty-seven, Truffaut deliberately made something that could not be mistaken for a follow-up: an adaptation of David Goodis's American pulp novel Down There, starring the chanteur Charles Aznavour, veering between farce, gangster picture and tragedy from one scene to the next. It flopped in France.

Charlie Kohler plays honky-tonk piano in a bar in a shabby corner of Paris. His brother arrives pursued by two comically incompetent hoods; Léna, the waitress, takes an interest; and the film gradually reveals, in a long flashback, the concert career and the marriage that Charlie walked away from. Raoul Coutard shot it in wintry monochrome scope. Truffaut throws in an iris wipe, a split screen, a gangster who swears on his mother's life and is immediately cut to a shot of a dying woman, and a kidnapping conducted entirely in banter.

Its reputation was made abroad, particularly in the United States, where a generation of directors took the licence it offered — tonal instability as a legitimate structure. Truffaut himself was ambivalent about it afterwards. It remains the freest film he made, and the clearest evidence that the New Wave's argument was never only about realism; it was about being allowed to change register mid-sentence.