Jazz and animation make for robust bedfellows in “They Shot the Piano Player,” a movie from Spanish administrators Fernando Treuba and Javier Mariscal that represents an intriguing hybrid in all types of the way. It’s a love letter to the bossa nova motion that peaked within the Nineteen Sixties, whereas on the similar time it’s a sobering procedural that appears into the state homicide of a musician that occurred as fascistic regimes rose to energy in Latin America within the ’70s. It’s a documentary, or at the very least extra nonfiction than not, though it has a completely concocted framing machine. And above and past the film’s considerably incongruous combination of gritty political realism and giddy music appreciation, sure, it’s utterly hand-drawn.
So should you like motion pictures that draw outdoors the traces, so to talk, then “They Shot the Piano Player” will likely be for you, even when it affords higher rewards on a scene-by-scene foundation than it does with any robust payoff to a story buildup. The determine on the heart of the movie is a long-gone Brazilian pianist, Francisco Tenório Júnior, who’s maintained a powerful cult following in jazz and samba circles since abruptly disappearing — or being “disappeared” — on tour in Argentina in 1976.
The film provides us a fictional New Yorker journalist, voice-acted by Jeff Goldblum, who at first is pursuing a basic retrospective piece on bossa nova, then shifts his focus to discovering out the reality about what occurred to Tenório, who was typically assumed to have been kidnapped and killed by paramilitary forces throughout his tour stopover. There is a fact finally revealed in regards to the pianist’s destiny, however there’s no huge shock or twist to it, so the backbone of the film is the conversations the Goldblum character has with Tenório’s widow, youngsters, mistress and bandmates in regards to the private void he left, the banality of sanctioned evil and the glories of nice musicianship.
Anyone coming in utterly chilly to “They Shot the Piano Player” might discover themselves with their very own thriller to unravel: what’s actual and what’s not, amid these superbly florid illustrations of clearly vérité-sounding monologues. The reply is that, beginning about 15 years in the past, Treuba started conducting interviews with Tenório’s contemporaries and survivors, with the intent, apparently, of sometime assembling a standard live-action documentary, earlier than having a eureka second about taking it into the realm of animation with the assistance of Mariscal. They have earlier shared historical past in that realm, having been Oscar-nominated for 2010’s “Chico & Rita.” (Treuba has a earlier solo Oscar win to his credit score, for greatest overseas movie in 1992 for “Belle Epoque.”) In going that route, Treuba additionally invented the Goldblum character, reasonably than having himself animated because the central investigative determine. Goldblum clearly brings a powerful co-sign to the challenge, as a jazz nut, though it’s somewhat powerful getting used to the actor’s distinctive voice popping out of a personality that’s drawn to look nothing like him.
There could also be no subgenre of music fairly as completely dedicated to releasing pheromones as bossa nova. So the truth that “They Shot the Piano Player” is wallpapered with basic examples of the stuff has the unusual impact of lulling you right into a sort of peaceable, straightforward feeling for nearly your entire size of the film, whilst its interviewees are recalling the pervasive dread within the area within the ’70s or discussing the navy coups that claimed Tenório as one in all 1000’s of by no means formally reported victims. It’s an ironic juxtaposition that feels largely intentional, however unavoidable anyway, given simply how a lot of a jazz lover Treuba is (he’s truly a music producer, in his non-directorial hours), and the way a lot of that fabulous music he needed to pack in.
The dribbling out of details about Tenório, who was a younger, apolitical man of solely 24 when he was snatched off the road practically a half-century in the past, comes slowly and generally repetitively, because the film’s roughly 40 real-life interview topics are inclined to repeat among the similar basic impressions. Yet it by no means stops being visually fascinating, even when the marginally jerky type of illustration might at first vex viewers who’re used to seeing utterly easy transitions from body to border. Locations from New York to Rio to Buenos Aires come alive in Mariscal’s vivid, nearly DayGlo coloration schemes, and even the talking-heads interviews, which might have grown monotonous if Treuba had gone along with his unique live-action plan, are sort of casually mesmerizing, topic to this palette.
One of the film’s greatest scenes is a re-creation of the 1964 recording session that ended up being the one one Tenório ever did as a band chief, versus a sideman to extra well-known names. Watching what Mariscal and Treuba have carried out to show that prolonged instrumental jam into a bit of actual musical cinema, filled with garish-yet-cool yellows and blues, you may want they might do a whole movie of nothing however animated jazz sequences. As it’s, the strategies they’ve used to “shoot” the performances of the late topic and his contemporaries have a kick that feels worthy of a second or third viewing, even when Tenório’s destiny is all too foreordained on the primary.
