Cinemania

A deceptively modest meditation on the nature of music — seductive in its patient evokation of golden age of Jazz.
Bertrand Tavernier, the best French Director no one’s heard of, really shines when he is stripping the genre film down to its most basic parts. He did wonders for the police procedural with L.627, deftly dodging cliches and instead of going through the mechanics of a hackneyed plot, focuses on the lyrical futility of one cop’s desire to make a difference in the streets. Tavernier does the same for the musician film with Round Midnight — a film that cuts deep into the addiction belying the love and creation of art. Most films about musicians follow a bio-pic format (Ray, Walk the Line), the interesting ones find a way to turn the musician’s art into cinematic art (32 Short Films about Glenn Gould). Round Midnight wisely focuses on an aging saxophonist, Dale Turner’s (Dexter Gordon,) tour in Paris. Its never said that this tour is this final, but Dexter Gordon (a real-life musician) seems to be in his twilight years, wielding his lumbering body and gravelly voice to a uniquely nostalgic effect.

I was wary of the film at first, mostly because it reminded me of the woeful Last King of Scotland — aka normal joe befriends larger than life personality and as such the audience is shown discomfortingly personal shades of his character. The problem with this format is that we usually don’t give a shit about the normal joe. However Tavernier avoids this one-sidedness and instead opts for a double narrative — as complete devotees of jazz, we see its effects getting the better of their moral responsibilities. Their symbiotic nature goes far beyond the trappings of a normal musician film or buddy flick but most of all, with its smoky clubs and lazy summer afternoons listening to the record player, Round Midnight makes you FEEL the jazz, making the characters’ plights all the more understandable.

Rating 8.5/10