Round Midnight

“Round Midnight is a drama set in the jazz clubs of Paris in the late 1950s: The real-life jazz tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays the lead role as Dale Turner — a failed former musician who drowns his sorrows in alcohol and drugs and spends his evenings jamming with his friends at the legendary Blue Note club in Saint-Germain. One night, Turner’s path happens to cross that of Francis Boriers, an unsuccessful graphic designer who had once idolised the saxophonist at the height of his career. From this fleeting encounter, a friendship slowly develops, during which the two men reflect on the ruptures in their lives, love and music. Numerous other well-known jazz musicians appeared in the film, (…) with particular praise going to the ageing Gordon, who received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance.’ (Jonathan Broxton, moviemusicuk.us, Oct 2016)

As the coda to the series, Round Midnight shifts the focus: away from jazz as a symbol of modernity, coolness and urban freedom, and towards the bodies that embodied this myth. In 1986, Bertrand Tavernier looks back on a world that many earlier films still depict as the present – but which is now marked by age, exhaustion, exile, dependency and economic insecurity. In the case of Dexter Gordon, it is not an actor who embodies this story, but a musician whose life story is inscribed in the role. Thus, the film becomes a melancholic retrospective on jazz following its cultural heyday: not as an end, but as the afterlife of a modernity whose splendour and wear and tear are now inseparable. (nr)