Police investigation, biography through the void, portrait of a brief period of continental artistic turmoil, major account of South American dictatorships: the indecision of the forms and genres they borrowed They shot the piano player Say something about the very nature of the deliberations, hesitations and complications surrounding a long-gestating documentary project, fueled by more than a hundred interviews, that languished for years before being reborn in the form of an animated film.
Sudden disappearance
The filmmaker Fernando Trueba was initially interested in the Brazilian pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior. A famous unknown, revered by his colleagues who consider him one of the greatest of jazz, the young man accompanied the kings of bossa nova, João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Toquinho and Vinicius de Moraes. Before he fainted while on tour in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1976, in the early hours of the military coup. For Trueba, which he imagines as a classic documentary, he sails from New York to São Paulo, from Paris to Rio, collecting more than 150 interviews with musicians who shared Tenório’s life or were influenced by him, technicians who worked with him and those he met, children, his lover, his wife. Like a detective, he collects scraps of memories and tender anecdotes, but also examines information and rumors surrounding his sudden disappearance. Without being able to give the whole thing a shape, it can be stored in the closet for years.
In his way, They shot the piano player Stages and coheres this profound work by telling the long-term account of a New York music journalist who was responsible for the emergence of the bossa nova scene but instead fell in love with the tenório mystery. To the point that his ten-page article stalls through detours, the initial curiosity mutates into obsession, the article into a desire for a book – in reality, for the film we are currently watching.
discreet chameleon
By adopting the language of animated cinema, Trueba (along with his partner Javier Mariscal, with whom he signed) Chico and Rita, in 2011, following his interview collection campaign) gives his project a visual coherence. Better yet, entrust the character design to the Brazilian Marcello Quintanilha, who awarded the comic book author the Best Album prize in Angoulême two years ago Ecoute, Jolie Marcia, He finds a discreet chameleon (the drawing does not draw the cover) but scientific, able to give as much zest to interviews sunk in the armchair as to reconstructions of the evenings in the clubs where Bossa was born at the end of the 50s, warm and silky when necessary, discreet and serious as the film explores the sites of the Argentine junta’s downfall. This is perhaps the film’s most beautiful delicacy: it depicts, from the perspective of others, a forgotten artist like all those who, like him, were condemned to be neither dead nor alive, but simply to disappear.
