Our review of They Shot the Piano Player: the quest for a little-known jazz genius

Pianists sometimes have a hard time in the cinema. In Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut practices his skills with Charles Aznavour, targeted by gangsters. For the duration of one scene, he subtitles the song Avanie et framboise, by Boby Lapointe, helicon player, basic guitar or gypsy violin and not piano, which makes this precision irrelevant. The film is based on a “Black Series” by David Goodis. It is pure fiction. In They Shot the Piano Player, Fernando Trueba pays homage to Truffaut's Four Hundred Blows. A way of remembering that the New Wave and bossa nova were launched at the same time by young Parisians and Brazilians in the early 1950s.

They Shot the Piano Player, co-directed with his accomplice Javier Mariscal, is not an ordinary documentary. It’s a dive into Brazilian music, a journalistic investigation and a political thriller. All drawn by the Brazilian comic book author, Marcello Quintanilha, Golden Fauve at the Angoulême Festival in 2022, already at work on Chico and Rita, the previous animated film by the Spanish tandem Trueba and Mariscal . We find its clear line and warm colors.

The pianist of the title is called Francisco Tenorio Jr, the best kept secret in the history of jazz. In March 1976, while accompanying Vinicius de Moraes (author of the lyrics to The Girl from Ipanema) on tour, he disappeared in Buenos Aires, on the eve of the military coup. He went out one night and never came back. Tenorio only recorded one album under his name (Embalo, in 1964). He has also accompanied the big names of bossa nova, such as Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Trueba only discovered his existence in Brazil in 2005 through a record. He began to do research, in the style of Jeff Harris, an American journalist from the New Yorker, whom he invented in They Shot the Piano Player. The alter ego of the director, to whom actor Jeff Goldblum lends his voice, the most “caliente” and jazzy in all of Hollywood. All the musicians interviewed praise the refined touch of Tenorio, a great admirer of the American pianist Bill Evans. The members of the group he was part of at the time of his disappearance in Buenos Aires (Vinicius de Moraes, Mutinho, Toquinho) as well as those who place him very high in their pantheon (Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque).

His mistress, Malena, present with him in Buenos Aires, and his wife, Carmen, also bear witness to the genius and fanciful personality of Tenorio, entirely devoted to music. But They Shot the Piano Player is not a compilation of interviews. It is a recreation of the artistic and musical effervescence of Rio in the 1960s and 1970s. We see Ella Fitzgerald, after a recital in a chic hotel, ignite a club in Beco das Garrafas, a carioca cul-de-sac and epicenter of bossa nova .

They Shot the Piano Player can be listened to as much as it has been watched. But the colors become darker as the truth emerges. In Buenos Aires in 1976, wearing long hair and a beard was enough to get you arrested. It doesn't take much for General Jorge Rafael Videla's henchmen to mistake Tenorio for a dangerous leftist. Trueba and Mariscal put the pieces of the puzzle together and retrace the last days of the pianist, victim among others of Operation Condor which saw the entire South American continent fall under the yoke of dictatorships, with the support of the United States.

The Note of Figaro: 3/4