A horn in a Paris room
Dale Turner speaks slowly, as if the next sentence had to walk across a room before it could be said. Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight, released in 1986, asks Dexter Gordon to play a fictional saxophonist in 1959 Paris, a man assembled from Lester Young, Bud Powell and Gordon’s own long tone. François Cluzet is Francis, a French fan who hears the damage and offers a small apartment anyway. The plot is a friendship. The subject is what a night’s work costs when the work is jazz and the body has already been asked for too many nights.
Gordon was not an actor by trade, which is why the performance cannot be copied. He plays his own horn. He lets silences sit. He wears the hat and the glasses and the fatigue without turning them into props. Herbie Hancock wrote the score and won the Academy Award for it, a rare case of the prize landing on music that had to function as weather, not as a cue for tears. In the club the film calls the Blue Note, Hancock, Billy Higgins, Bobby Hutcherson and the other players do not mime a rhythm section. They are one. The camera stays long enough that you can hear a solo decide where it is going. Lonette McKee passes through as the old love, a memory with a voice.
Tavernier, a Frenchman in love with American pictures, refuses the usual expatriate romance. Paris is not a reward for having suffered in the States. It is a smaller room, a colder walk, a public that listens and a business that still pays badly. Francis’s devotion is touching and a little greedy. He wants to save Dale and he wants to be near the music, and the film lets both motives stand. The title is Thelonious Monk’s ballad, which is a way of saying that the sadness was already in the repertoire before anyone wrote this script. Gordon, nominated for best actor, carries the nomination the way he carries a phrase: without rushing the ending.
He is a musician, not an actor, and yet no actor could have given this performance, with its dignity, wisdom and pain.
(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1986)
Jazz films often cheat by cutting the playing down to a flourish. This one trusts the audience to watch men work. Blues and jazz, shelved together on a site like this, share that ethic: time is the instrument. Round Midnight understands that a ballad is not a pause in the evening. It is the evening. When Dale lifts the horn, the story politely steps back. You are grateful. Biopics of the same decade wanted confession and collapse on a schedule. Tavernier wanted the sound of a man who has not collapsed yet, and who might, and who is, for these bars, exact.
The film ends the way a set ends, not the way a moral ends. Someone has been heard. Someone has been changed by listening, which is not the same as being redeemed. Gordon died a few years later, and the performance became a last room you can still enter. Round Midnight remains the music film that treats a solo as a dramatic event equal to a kiss or a blow. In the Blue Note, under a sign you can read, a saxophonist finishes a sentence he started before the movie began. The apartment light stays on a little longer than it has to. That extra minute is the tenderness.
