“They Shot the Piano Player”: the trail of a jazz giant’s murder
Attention, fans of samba, bossa nova and ambitious nonfiction/fiction hybrids, animated division: Here is a clear choice for worthwhile moviegoing.
“They Shot the Piano Player” investigates the short life and 1976 disappearance and likely political assassination of Brazilian jazz keyboardist Francisco Tenório Júnior, a revered if spottily known figure in the realm of jazz.
The film comes from Spanish director Fernando Trueba, here co-directing once again with artist Javier Mariscal. Their memorably fragrant collaboration on the 2010 animated gem “Chico & Rita” explored a similar, childlike animation style and related thematic ideas, creating a fictional love story spiced with various real-life jazz geniuses, from Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente.
“They Shot the Piano Player” is more about truth than imagination, but the cross-currents between the two are everywhere. It begins with a book signing. A (fictional) Brooklynbased journalist acknowledges that his new book on Tenório Jr. was born from an unfinished book on the cultural history and analysis of the bossa nova movement. The name Tenório was new to him, he tells his bookstore audience. But realizing Tenório Jr. played on so many seminal bossa nova albums coming out of Brazil, exported to an eternally grateful world, he had his subject.
That subject’s tragic, dangling-modifier of an ending only made it more urgent. On tour in Buenos Aires, in the midst of the Argentinean dictatorship’s statesanctioned torture and murder spree targeting vaguely defined dissidents, the Brazilian piano player met up with his lover. Late that night, Tenório Jr. left the dreamy, unreliable, unfaithful and perennially broke family man.
The film basically and improbably works, even with some limitations. Most of the brilliant, gorgeous, world-changing music, starting with the 1958 recording of “Chega de Saudade,” confines itself to the first half. The second half goes too deep into the writer’s investigation of what likely happened to Tenório Jr. after he became one of the “disappeared” to accommodate much in the way of bossa nova breezes. “They Shot the Piano Player” sometimes feels like two films, required to share the same framework.
Even so, the telling details linger. One Tenório contemporary, who says he witnessed the kidnapping, remembers that the brutal Argentinean government favored Ford Falcons, black, as the abduction vehicles of choice. In the end Tenório Jr. may have had the simple, awful bad luck to visit Buenos Aires at a time when widespread sweeps and incarceration of “subversive elements” permeated daily life and death. Tenório Jr. didn’t care much about politics or political dissent. Maybe not at all, in fact. It was enough, says one reallife government flunky, now “reformed,” that Tenório Jr. ventured out late one night looking like a communist sympathizer — because, as the man says, after a nervous pause, he seemed like he’d have “artist and musician friends.”