When Shoot the Piano Player was first released, one journalist asked if the film was intended to be a comedy or a tragedy. Truffaut replied, simply, “It’s both.” Indeed, Piano Player is a unique amalgamation of numerous genres and tones, combining hard-boiled gangster film and bittersweet romance with elements of slapstick comedy. The result is a film that defies easy description; Truffaut himself alternately termed it a “fairy tale”, “almost a musical” and, perhaps most fittingly, a “grab bag” .
 
This stylistic and generic innovation (and the film’s subsequent resistance to taxonomy) was initially the source of some contention; upon its release, it was met with what Kent Jones terms a “disappointing to disastrous reception by the critics and the public (to say nothing of the censors).” But, as critics have come to recognize, it is this very mélange of moods that makes Piano Player such a unique and engaging film. Rather than being cagey or elusive in his response, Truffaut was actually gesturing towards the film’s greatest strength: its ability to be at once playful and wistful, light-hearted and haunting.

In Piano Player, Truffaut freely mixes devices and borrows conventions, combining them to creative and unexpected ends. Based on American pulp writer David Goodis’s 1956 Down There, Piano Player tells the story of a man who tries, and ultimately fails, to escape his past. It’s a typical set-up for a gangster story, but Truffaut thickens the plot by having our protagonist be not a hard-bodied hero (or thug), but a slight and shy concert pianist who is unsure how to communicate with the world around him. Rather than telling the standard tale of a strong-willed sort who battles against the world, Piano Player then becomes about a man who battles against himself—who is fundamentally unsure if he is good or bad, deserving of happiness or not. This is ingeniously articulated through the use of voiceover, a device oft-used in the film noir or gangster tale. Interior monologue functions in the former films to display the protagonist’s awareness and understanding of the world around them; for example, the voiceover in Sunset Boulevard, the protagonist’s posthumous recounting of the tale now that, in death, he understands how it all fits together. Here, Edouard’s inner thoughts are exhibited, but he lacks the certainty of his film noir peers; instead, his voiceovers serve only as glimpses into his neuroses, the things he wants to do but cannot, the inner self he cannot reconcile with the outer. Truffaut also treats us to several visual moments that underscore this theme and lend this gangster tale even greater poignancy—for example, the numerous shots of protagonist Edouard’s hands, so certain and strong on the keyboard, faltering as he attempts to touch a woman, to ring the doorbell of a potential tutor.
 
Though the film is largely dramatic in its structure and its content, it is nonetheless imbued with moments of unexpected levity. Piano Player features a number of broad slapstick gags, none better than the famous moment when a gangster declares that his mother should “drop over dead” if he is lying followed by a quick shot of her doing exactly that. But there are subtler instances of comedy as well. While not a comedic filmmaker per se, Truffaut often precisely locates humor in human behavior; consider, for example, the moment in The 400 Blows when Antoine’s classmate furiously scribbles in his notebook, frantically starting again each time he drags ink marks all over his work, or the moment in this film where a dancer simultaneously lures a half-soused youth out of his chair and rebuffs his advances, only to turn into another man’s arms when he finally explodes in frustration.These moments, deftly and delightfully enacted, serve to further confound our expectations; as Annette Insdorf suggests, they “lead us to an awareness of how close laughter and suffering can be and how experience is more complex than the terms with which we label it.” Insdorf's comment reveals why Truffaut's approach here is so successful; ultimately, in melding numerous styles, Truffaut refuses to compartmentalize emotion, a gesture that at once challenges our typical responses to film and demonstrates a view of life that is complex and multifaceted.
 
Piano Player’s blending of moods is far from its only virtue—the simultaneous concision and playfulness of its storytelling is perhaps worthy of another full-length discussion. But it is certainly one of its most notable-- a viable reason for why Jones describes the film as “[the] skeleton key to Truffaut’s oeuvre-- the film in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole”, and why critics now view the film as a masterpiece of the modern cinema.