Round Midnight

Since his death on March 25, tributes to the French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier have been pouring forth, some of them very personal, and others unintentionally backhanded. Tavernier could turn a pulp novel by Jim Thompson into Coup de Torchon, an entertaining (and proudly contrived) tour-de-force, but only because he had already proved he was an artist. 

Last week I examined Tavernier‘s affectionate portrait of an old painter, A Sunday in the Country, and wished that that Tavernier were not so much in love with his subject. It proved that love, which is expansive and uncritical by nature, can cause an artist to go off the rails. Then last week The New Yorker published a tribute to Tavernier's Round Midnight (1986), “The Film That Jazz Deserves,” by Howard Fishman, a “writer, performer and composer,” that singles out one of his least effective films for high praise: 

The French auteur’s career included such stylistically disparate films as “A Sunday in the Country” and “Death Watch,” but his signature work may be the moody, impressionistic “ ’Round Midnight,” from 1986, about an aging American jazz musician in nineteen-fifties Paris and the admiring fan who befriends and helps him. It’s ironic (and maybe fitting) that it took a foreign director to do justice to a quintessential American art form. “ ’Round Midnight” is the film that jazz deserves. (1)

Putting aside for the moment the question of what jazz deserves, Tavernier, who evidently loves jazz, left a lot of space in the film for the music. As a jazz lover myself, I enjoyed these scenes in which Dexter Gordon and the other musicians Tavernier cast in the film that included Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson and Billy Higgins, played, but when you notice how little attention their music attracts in the club in which they play, even in ultra-cool Paris, it made me wonder how many new jazz fans Tavernier hoped to find. I would never argue for a resurgence in the popularity of jazz – at the same level it enjoyed in the 1950s. Those days are long gone. As Auden wrote, “the wind has changed,” and jazz has lost its audience. In the whole history of jazz recordings, only eight have sold more than one million copies, and only one has sold more than two million. (2) 

The story is presented in linear terms: Dale Turner is a jazz saxophone player who, in 1950, is driven from New York to France in search of performance gigs. There, at the Paris Blue Note Café (where Bud Powell performed and was recorded), Turner meets Francis, a young Frenchman who designs movie posters. Francis idolizes Turner and involves himself in his precarious life, watches as his fondness for red wine gets out of hand, frees him from the clutches of a manipulating woman, takes him into his own home and helps him get clean. But Turner has a teenaged daughter in New York and wants to see her again. Francis, by now Turner’s caretaker, accompanies him to New York, arranges for his reunion with his daughter. But upon his return to France, while watching his home movies of Turner, a telegram is pushed under his door notifying Francis of Turner’s death. 

The Round Midnight script is credited to Tavernier and David Rayfiel, “inspired by incidents in the lives of Francis Paudras & Bud Powell.” (It is also “respectfully dedicated” to Bud Powell and Lester Young.) Francis Paudras was as much of a jazz impresario as he was an aficionado of the music. He not only had great enthusiasm for the music but took an active part in the troubled life of Bud Powell. Powell was an extraordinary practitioner of be-bop on piano. The choice of the song “’Round Midnight” written by Thelonious Monk is apt, if a touch ironic. Powell’s style of playing was much more like Charlie Parker’s and Dizzie Gillespie’s than Monk’s minimalism. Powell played on the very first recording of the song in 1944. He suffered from mental breakdowns, alcoholism, didn’t enjoy the same breaks as Monk, didn’t record as much and spent most of his later years in France. It was there that Paudras found Powell and his intervention in his life is the basis of Tavernier’s film. (3) Paudras wrote about Bud Powell in a book, Dance of the Infidels, published in French in 1986, but in English only until 1998, shortly after Paudras’s suicide. 

The reason for Tavernier’s insistence on casting Dexter Gordon as Dale Turner in the film was because he was tired of seeing actors pretend to play an instrument, a piano or a trumpet, in movies when it was so obvious that they couldn’t play a note. But the reason why real musicians weren’t cast in such roles was simple enough: they couldn’t act. Tavernier sacrificed art for verity, which is a surprising thing for any artist to do. 

The most moving part of the story, for me, is when Dale finds that he can no longer remain in France and must return to his racist, segregationist home. How many jazz artists went through this? Jazz may have been celebrated in Europe, but it lives in America. Francis goes with him, but the ghosts of Dale’s old life – in the form of a drug dealer – come back to haunt him. There is an odd and picturesque montage at the film's close of some of the ruins of what must've been Brooklyn. 

Only someone unfamiliar with Tavernier’s finer films – unfamiliar with The Clockmaker, The Judge and the Murderer, and It All Begins Today – could find things to praise in Round Midnight. Sadly, Round Midnight is much better known than his other films simply because it had an American producer (Irwin Winkler) and much wider distribution in the US through Warner Brothers. I remember being thrilled when Bobby McFerrin came onstage to perform the titular song (written by Thelonious Monk) when the film’s soundtrack, produced by Herbie Hancock, was nominated – and won – an Oscar. But, then, the music in Round Midnight is irreproachable. Everything else – Alexander Trauner’s art direction, Bruno de Keyzer’s camerawork, and Jaqueline Moreau’s costumes – is window dressing. 

(1) "The Film That Jazz Deserves," Howard Fishman, The New Yorker, April 21, 2021.

(2) ”Kind of Blue” with the Miles Davis Quintet is 4X Platinum. 

(3) There is a coincidence of sorts between Paudras’s accounts and a story by Julio Cortázar that was brought to my attention by Thomas Beltzer in an essay published in Senses of Cinema: In both stories, a white Frenchman attaches himself to an African-American saxophone genius in Paris who is struggling with several addictions and a precarious hold on his own reality. In both stories, the sycophantic Frenchmen escape their own sterility by riding on their jazzmen’s instinctive transcendence while desperately attempting to delay their idol’s self-destruction, sensing that somehow their own survival is dependent on the survival of the musicians. ("La Mano Negra: Julio Cortázar and his Influence on Cinema," Thomas Beltzer, Senses of Cinema, April 2005.)