All the Colors: Bertrand Tavernier Talks about "Round Midnight"

Abstract

With Round Midnight, Bertrand Tavernier has made a fiction feature about jazz musicians without false picturesque details or corkscrewy melodramatic plotting. Meandering and eddying like the curls and backflows of a developing jazz improvisation, the film chronicles the West Bank Parisian existence that so many black American jazzmen, fleeing homegrown racism, poverty, and neglect, took up during after World War II and throughout the 1950s. Instead of the floating party presented in Paris Blues, all glamorous romances, tempestuous artistic crises, and the usual tourist attractions, or Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which (to quote Pauline Kael)) uses jazz and Negroes and sex all mixed together in a cheap and sensational way that, I assume, is exotic for the French, Round Midnight shows these expatriates existing in a continuous orbit between the stages of tiny boites like the legendary Blue Note and a series of drab, characterless hotels. In these clubs, they swim in their self-generated seas of sounds usually lost even as they loft forth, except in the dimming memories of each night's small bands of aficionados or on an occasional bootleg recording. In the hotels, they sit torpidly, drink, cook Southern-style when they can find the ingredients, exchange occasional gnomic remarks, wait out the leaden hours until the next set.