My life in Hong Kong: film festing, and way too ubiquitous
police presence (See the police van on the
other side of the road from the HKIFF advertising?) :S
They Shot the Piano Player (Spain-France-The Netherlands-Portugal-Peru-U.K., 2023)
- Fernando Treuba (who's also wrote the script) and Javier Mariscal, directors
- Voice actors: Jeff Goldblum, Tony Ramos, Abel Ayala, Roberta Wallach
- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Fetival's Animation Unlimited program
The last animated movie I viewed prior to viewing this multinational offering was Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron (Japan, 2023). I realise it's unfair to compare these two very different cinematic offerings -- but if I did so, I'd say that I actually liked They Shot the Piano Player better, and am surprised that it didn't even get nominated for the Animated Feature Film Oscar that the Studio Ghibli production won this year.
Speaking of Oscar nominated animated works: Persepolis (France-U.S., 2007) is one of three works I got to thinking of when viewing They Shot the Piano Player; with the other two being the non-animated Academy Award winners Searching for Sugar Man (2012) and Missing (1982). For like Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's work about a girl growing up in Islamic Revolution-era Iran, this offering from Fernando Teruba and Javier Mariscal is an animated docudrama -- in the latter case, about an American journalist trying to figure out what happened to a musical hero who appeared to have vanished into thin air, a la Searching the Sugar Man's Sixto Rodriguez, in a foreign, South American country similar to the fictional one that's the setting for Costa-Gavras' Missing.
It's 2010 and New York music journalist Jeff Harris (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) is planning on writing a book about the Brazilian bossa nova craze of the 1960s. Early on in his research, he comes across a recording featuring the piano playing of Francisco Tenório Júnior and determines to learn more about this Brazilian musical talent.
On research trips to Brazil, Jeff interviews illustrious Brazilian bossa nova musicians like Gilberto Gil, João Donato and Chico Buarque (voicing themselves in the movie) about their music, and memories of Tenório Júnior. At some point, he changes the subject of his planned book to the piano player whose music, life and mysterious disappearance back in 1976 he has become well nigh obsessed with. And eventually, he is able to piece together the tragic story of a much beloved musician and man who went missing while on tour in then dictator-ruled Argentina -- leaving behind a wife, children, mistress and many friends mourning his disappearance from their lives.
At one level, They Shot the Piano Player is a enthralling dramatic investigation into what happened to a piano player who look to have unwittingly got involved in South American politics, to his great detriment. At another, it's a chilling indictment of totalitarian regimes and their state terrorism -- which, in South America, led, among other tragedies, to the "disappearance" tens of thousands of people, many, if not all, of them innocents. At the same time, it's also a beautifully hand-drawn work that's a thoroughly affecting celebration of bossa nova, and the life of Tenório Júnior.
It is very much to its makers' credit that they attempted to do so much, and succeeded in doing so. A feast for the eyes and ears, this work -- which also happens to be tri-lingual (English, Portuguese and Spanish) -- is also heart-breaking and heart-warming at different parts of its story -- which, it is worth emphasizing, is, at heart, non-fiction. (The fictional bit comes from the man who became obsessed with the story of Tenório Júnior -- so much so that he kept at it for some two decades! -- being not Jeff Harris but the film's co-director and scriptwriter, Fernando Trueba -- and instead of writing a book about the Brazilian musician, he made They Shot the Piano Player!)
My rating for this film: 9.0
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