Bursting with the tropical sounds and sun-drenched sensuality of Rio de Janeiro, They Shot the Piano Player is an animated documentary told within a semi-fictional framework, which pays homage to the Brazilian bossa nova era and one of its fallen heroes. The veteran Spanish directing duo Fernando Trueba and Javier Marisca, who earned an Oscar shortlist slot with their previous feature collaboration Chico and Rita (2010), once again show off their flair for old-school hand-drawn 2D animation here, deploying a voluptuously vivid colour palette and stylised retro graphics that dance around the screen like visual jazz. Woven into the audio mix with real interview material, Jeff Goldblum voices the main fictional protagonist, a New Yorker writer who is investigating a tragic lost chapter in Brazil’s musical history. World premiered in Telluride, this colourful docu-fiction hybrid plays in competition in San Sebastian this week, with further festival platforms to follow ahead of theatrical release in October.
They Shot the Piano Player is a love letter to a revolutionary period in Brazilian pop culture, but also a specific memorial to Francisco Tenório Júnior, a pioneering pianist during the bossa nova boom that erupted across Rio in the late 1950s, becoming a worldwide craze in the 1960s. Tenório was a composer and band leader but mostly a virtuoso sideman, playing with giants of the era like Milton Nascimento, Gal Costa and Vinícius de Moraes. He managed to survive under the right-wing military dictatorship that seized power in Brazil from 1964 onwards, sending many of his peers into jail or exile, but he later fell victim to another.
In March 1976, during a tour, Tenório left his Buenos Aires hotel on a short errand and never returned. The full details of his disappearance are still vague, but most accounts agree he was picked up by Argentina’s military police, detained, tortured and executed. Almost at random, he became one of around 30,000 innocents murdered by the junta during their decade-long “dirty war”. He was 34 years old.
As spoiler-heavy titles go, They Shot the Piano Player lands pretty squarely on the nose, at least in its more direct English-language translation. But it was obviously too tempting as both concise plot summary and winking Francois Truffaut homage, underscoring the parallels that Trueba and Marisca draw between Brazilian bossa nova and French cinema’s contemporaneous nouvelle vague movement – both translate as “new wave”, of course. There are no great shock revelations here in the vein of Searching for Sugar Man (2012), but the directors are opening up this half-forgotten story to a wider and younger global audience, adding extra emotional shading and personal memories from friends, lovers, family members and former musical contemporaries of the late piano maestro.
Trueba and Marisca originally planned to make a straight documentary about Tenório, and some of that undiluted interview material survives in They Shot the Piano Player, framed here as the journalistic investigations of author Jeff Harris, voiced by Goldblum in typically wry style. Among the Brazilian musical icons who share their memories on screen are Gilberto Gil, Gaetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and many more. Thanks to the infinite fantastical possibilities of animation, there are also fleeting cameos here by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Jean-Luc Godard, Stan Getz and others. Blending animated interview clips with archive flashbacks and speculative reconstruction, the film’s patchwork structure becomes loopy and disjointed in places, constantly revisiting the same events. Multiple inspired set-piece scenes stand out, even if the overall narrative through-line never quite coheres.
A little more light is thrown on Tenório’s final days in a vintage interview clip with a former Argentinian corporal, who claims the musician was most likely snatched from the street based on his long-haired hippie appearance, possibly even a victim of mistaken identity. He was then taken to the notorious Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the largest clandestine detention and torture centre in Argentina during the junta years. Despite espousing fairly apolitical views, his bohemian artist lifestyle would have automatically been deemed a sign of suspiciously leftist sympathies. With apparent permission from Brazilian security services, it appears Tenorio was shot dead by the infamous “angel of death”, Argentine navy captain and mass murderer Alfredo Astiz. In 2011, Astiz was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
They Shot the Piano Player is stilted in places, with chunks of clunky exposition and political background context dropped clumsily into the narrative. But it is also packed with information, visually ravishing and rich in human interest, with clear appeal beyond specialist music-fan circles. It works both as instant primer on bossa nova jazz-pop and an entry-level history lesson for curious students of Latin America’s troubled Cold War decades, when military dictatorships like those in Brazil and Argentina were covertly suppported by the CIA and US government.
Given its tragic central theme, They Shot the Piano Player could have been a sombre memorial, but Trueba and Marisca make sure it plays like a life-affirming celebration of Tenório’s generous spirit and musical legacy. The soundtrack, as we might expect, is a pure gold, densely woven with music by its subject and his peers, still sounding as fresh and fragrant as a perfumed ocean breeze.
Directors: Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal
Screenplay: Fernando Trueba
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Tony Ramos, Abel Ayala, Roberta Wallach, Angela Rabelo, Stephen Hughes
Producers: Cristina Huete, Serge Laloand, Sophie Cabon, Bruno Felix, Janneke van der Kerkhof, Femke Wolling, Humberto Santana
Animation director: Carlos León Sancha
Editing: Arnau Quiles Pascuai
Production company: Fernando Trueba PC SA (Spain)
World sales: Film Constellation (London)
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (special screenings)
In English, Portuguese
103 minutes
