Review: They Shot the Piano Player (2023)
The story of a brilliant jazz pianist murdered -- like millions of others -- by fascism
They Shot the Piano Player (2023)
Directed by Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba
Written by Fernando Trueba
This is an animated film about real* people. It’s the story of a Brazilian jazz pianist named Francisco Tenório Cerqueira Junior — nicknamed Tenorinho, though throughout the movie he’s referred to as Tenório Jr. — who was highly regarded by the most famous and accomplished Brazilian musicians at the time (and now internationally renowned): Gilberto Gil, João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso.
Tenório Jr. released a single album of music by his own band at age 23, though he appears on the recordings of many others. His freely flowing style (as well as his appearance) earned him comparisons with Bill Evans. In the film, his collaborators and contemporaries praise him for his playing and for his general demeanor, although he apparently was often unreliable, walking out of recording sessions on a whim or simply never showing up.
This habit of disappearing foreshadowed his fate. As a member of a touring group, he went from Brazil to Buenos Aires in March, 1976 during a time when a far-right military dictatorship ruled both of those countries. After a show in Buenos Aires on the night of March 18, he left his hotel on a short errand, and vanished. He left behind a family of four children; his wife was pregnant with their fifth.
Framing this tragedy is the story told by a writer with the unprepossessing name of Jeff Harris.* Voiced in the film by Jeff Goldblum, Harris* relates how a New Yorker article about the birth of Bossa Nova grew into a worldwide phenomenon got him a contract to write a book about it — but that in the process of researching the book, he stumbled upon the story of Tenório Jr. and couldn’t let it go.
His editor** allowed him to change the topic of his contracted book to the story of Tenório Jr., and it’s this story which is recounted in the film, which presents it as a mystery. What happened to this great musician? How could he just vanish when his career was really taking off?
Tenório Jr.’s disappearance, and exactly what happened to him, remained a mystery for years, until the fascist governments fell and a former member of the Argentine military laid out the details of Tenório Jr.’s disappearance and death.
What happened to Tenório Jr. is the same as what happened to hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans from the 1950s to the 80s: He was picked up by a military squad on suspicion of being a subversive (he had long hair), and was detained in a house of torture. After a couple of days, the unit that held him realized he was a foreign citizen, and also somewhat well-known. They realized that because he was well known his report of his detention and torture would get attention. And so — along with many thousands held by Argentinian death squads during the period of its dictatorship (not to mention those who met similar fates in Chile, Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries during their dictatorships) — Tenório Jr. was killed and his body disposed of in an unknown place. Probably his body was thrown into the ocean from a helicopter, as this was the preferred method (for both dead and living prisoners) used by the Argentine military. (To the filmmakers’ credit, the movie makes quite clear the historical fact that each of the military coups that led to dictatorships in all these Latin American countries were supported by the United States’ CIA.)
If this is where the movie spends most of its last third, it starts out in an entirely different place: the Strand bookstore reading by Jeff Harris* of his book about Tenório Jr. He’s there with his editor**, and starts out talking about how it (his book project, that is) all started out with his article on the birth of Bossa Nova in the New Yorker.*
The New Yorker, the Strand bookstore, the references (including the title “They Shot the Piano Player”) to French New Wave films of the 50s; the chipper figure of the woman editor** with whom, in a later scene, Harris* seems to be flirting; and the mystery-hunt atmosphere of at least the next hour in which the film seems at times to be a feature-length animated version of an episode of “This American Life” — not to mention the dominant subject, which is Brazilian music — it all starts out feeling rather twee. And, strike two, it’s certainly an example of the story of a Latin American told courtesy of a white norteamericano.*
But I felt that the emphasis, in the last third, on the tragic (and horrific) facts of Tenório Jr.’s disappearance and death, and the still-palpable grief in the voices of his former bandmates, friends and family members — aside from the voice of Harris/narrator and a couple of other people, all the voices in the film are the actual recorded voices of the people who knew Tenório Jr. — redeems the movie. As a viewer I came away with the mix of sadness and nostalgia that the filmmakers intend.
(UPDATE: *As it turns out, the figure of the writer Jeff Harris was made up by the filmmakers as a device to frame the story and to provide a way for the movie to jump from interviewee to interviewee. There was no New Yorker article, no book about Tenório, and **the figure of the book editor was also made up. Given the fact that the story was real, as were, apparently, all the interviews, the choice to frame the whole thing as a fictional investigation, and led by a white norteamericano to boot, seems curious at best and questionable at worst. An interview with the director describes the project as being a 15-year effort rather than the investigation of less than a year depicted in the film. So there's an additional mystery: what happened during those 15 years? Did the interview footage degrade somehow? Did they decide to make it an animated film because something happened to the film footage? Clearly a lot of questions remain, and they are at least distracting from the real persons the film intends to honor.
Here’s an excerpt from the review of the movie in Variety:1
The answer is that, starting about 15 years ago, [writer and co-director] Trueba began conducting interviews with Tenório’s contemporaries and survivors, with the intent, apparently, of someday assembling a traditional live-action documentary, before having a eureka moment about taking it into the realm of animation with the help of [co-director] Mariscal. They have previous shared history in that realm, having been Oscar-nominated for 2010’s “Chico & Rita.” (Trueba has a previous solo Oscar win to his credit, for best foreign film in 1992 for “Belle Epoque.”) In going that route, Trueba also invented the Harris/Goldblum character, rather than having himself animated as the central investigative figure. Goldblum obviously brings a strong co-sign to the project, as a jazz nut…
Okay. It still doesn’t explain why they chose to make their fictional investigator a white New Yorker writer — although I have to admit that the whole framing device of a book based on a New Yorker story by a music writer is a very believable chain of events. And it still doesn’t explain why a director would risk the credibility of a documentary about a real person and real music by using a fictional wrapper.)
Readers who wish to know more about Tenório Jr. would be interested in this 2021 Spanish-language article: https://www.elcohetealaluna.com/tenorinho-ahora-y-siempre/