'Round Midnight

 

Director Bertrand Tavernier with actor Philippe Noiret

Tavernier with Martin Scorsese

Dexter Gordon

 

 

 

‘ROUND MIDNIGHT             B+                                                                                          USA  France  (133 mi)  1986 ‘Scope  d: Bertrand Tavernier

The swing bands used to be all straight tonics seventh chords.  And then, with the Basie band I heard Lester Young and he sounded like he came out of the blue.  Because he was playing all the color tones the sixths and the ninths and major sevenths.  You know, like Debussy and Ravel.  Then Charlie Parker came on and he began to expand and he went into elevenths and thirteenths and flat fives.  Luckily, I was going in the same direction already.  You just don’t go out and pick a style off a tree one day.  The tree is inside you growing naturally.                       —Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon)

When you have to explore every night, even the most beautiful things that you find can be the most painful.                                                                                                                                   —Ace (Bobby Hutcherson)

The first English-language film by Bertrand Tavernier, the maker of Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à travers le cinéma français) (2016), where this is adapted from Dance of the Infidels, a 1986 book by French author and graphic designer Francis Paudras, a moving jazz memoir and biography that covers the last 8 years in the turbulent life of jazz pianist Bud Powell, who was to the piano what Charlie Parker was to the saxophone, with Tavernier, along with co-writer David Rayfiel, creating a fictionalized story combining the lives of Powell and tenor saxophonist Lester Young into a single character, an expatriate black jazz musician living in Paris during the late 1950’s, embodied by legendary tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the lead role, who was himself among the first influential bebop musicians.  Gordon had experience as a stage actor, appearing in the Los Angeles production of the 1959 play The Connection, made into a film by Shirley Clarke in 1961, which was about a collection of heroin-addicted jazz musicians who sat around waiting for their drug dealer, their “connection,” creating a great deal of censorship controversy at the time, yet it’s a compelling snapshot of a subculture that Gordon was familiar with, where the dialogue of the characters is interspersed with jazz music, some of which was written by Gordon.  According to Tavernier, jazz taught him the freedom of storytelling through improvisation, while also informing him that when performing a composition they didn’t write, musicians demonstrate a deep respect while simultaneously infusing it with their own unique style and personal touch.  This duality of respect for tradition and personal expression informs Tavernier’s filmmaking philosophy, where it’s ironic that it took a foreign director to do justice to jazz, a quintessential American artform, described by Roger Ebert in his TV review as a film that “creeps inside you and stays there,” Siskel & Ebert - 'Round Midnight YouTube (3:41).  Working closely with the director to ensure the film would accurately portray the jazz life, Gordon creates a unique persona that we’re not used to seeing, as he knew how musicians spoke and carried themselves, spending more than a dozen years living and performing in Europe, finding Europe in the 1960’s a much easier place to live than America, saying that he experienced less racism and greater respect for jazz musicians.  Named after a Thelonious Monk composition, the film was ranked #2 in Roger Ebert’s top films of 1986, and #9 in Gene Siskel’s top films of 1986, premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 1986, with Gordon nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award, while the jazz music written by pianist Herbie Hancock, one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound, who also appears in the film as pianist and bandleader Eddie Wayne, won an Oscar for Best Original Score in 1987, using harmonies influenced by great French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, beautifully rendered here, Herbie Hancock - The Peacocks YouTube (7:15), with Hancock quoted as saying, “Jazz is being in the moment.”  Gordon gives an inspired performance as the aging, self-destructive saxophonist Dale Turner, looking for a fresh start in Paris, where he is surrounded by an all-star group of young virtuoso musicians, giving the live jazz performances an authentic look and sound, where the film is light on plot, becoming more of an impressionistic mood piece, much like an extended jazz composition, even making reference to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948), suggesting “The music is all that matters.  Nothing but the music.”

An interesting aspect of Francis Paudras is that he was himself an accomplished yet amateur jazz and classical pianist, befriending many of the great jazz pianists who played in Europe in the early 60’s, and it was there that Paudras found Powell, where he developed a profound friendship, becoming his caretaker and unofficial manager in Paris during the early 60’s when Powell suffered a mental and physical health crisis, moving him into his own Paris apartment as he was recovering from mental breakdowns, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.  It was during this period that he began filming Powell with a 16mm home movie camera, amassing a collection of home movies, interviews, and recordings that offer valuable insights into Powell’s life.  This intervention in his life provides the template for Tavernier’s film, where the line between reality and fiction is very thin, while his decision to cast a deliberately slowed down, world weary Dexter Gordon, who is tall and lanky at six feet five, and seems to exist on another plane than everyone else around him, was based on the director’s displeasure with actors playing roles of musicians when it was obvious they couldn’t hold the instruments correctly or play a note, where he was going for authenticity, casting mostly black musicians as actors because they were real-life musical giants, giving the film credibility it wouldn’t otherwise have.  Other films about jazz have been undercut by both an ignorance about the music and by an inability to construct a dramatic context, including directors as diverse as Martin Ritt in Paris Blues (1961), John Cassavetes in Too Late Blues (1961), Martin Scorsese in New York, New York (1977), and Francis Ford Coppola in THE COTTON CLUB (1984), films that typically express an indifference to jazz history.  Tavernier makes up for this by hiring musicians who are among the best in the business, including Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Bobby Hutcherson, John McLaughlin, Billy Higgins, Cedar Walton, and French bassist Pierre Michelot who played with Powell, as nearly all of the music is recorded live, and we’re usually allowed to listen to it without edited interruptions, elevating the music of jazz to a central character, while he also allowed Gordon and the other musicians in the cast to collaborate on their own dialogue, with Gordon using the nickname “Lady” for all his friends, male and female, as well as his instrument, a habit attributed to Lester Young.  Considered among the best jazz films ever created, maybe the best, though Jeanne Moreau’s screen presence with the evocative film noir score by Miles Davis in Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958) is worthy of mention, while the best book on the subject may be the impressionistic stream-of-conscience novel about jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of jazz, in Coming Through Slaughter by Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist Michael Ondaatje, his first published novel in 1976.  This is much better known than Tavernier’s other films simply because it had an American producer (Irwin Winkler) and much wider distribution in the U.S. through Warner Brothers.  What’s interesting about the film is the community of American artists in Paris, where their off-handed humor, interest in cooking their own food (Bobby Hutcherson is always dressed in a silk bathrobe, hilariously never leaving his hotel room, as he’s completely obsessed with spending all of his time cooking soul food), and sociable camaraderie add a lighthearted touch of humanism that starkly contrasts with the vibrant energy of the late-night music scenes.  

When Powell moved to France, it was with his girlfriend Altevia “Buttercup” Edwards, who managed his finances and his medicine, with Tavernier similarly creating a part for Sandra Reaves-Phillips as Buttercup, a sassy blues singer who is seen in the hotel greeting Turner’s arrival before appearing in the small Parisian jazz nightclub named the Blue Note, where she keeps him locked in his room until showtime and prevents them from paying him in cash, while also making sure they refuse to serve him alcohol.  But that doesn’t stop him from seeking drinks elsewhere, which is where he initially meets penniless movie poster illustrator, single father, and jazz aficionado Francis Borier (François Cluzet), looking like a young Dustin Hoffman, seen faithfully squatting down in the basement windowsill outside the club to hear, even in the pouring rain, as he hasn’t the cover charge for admittance.  Turner asks him to buy him a beer across the street, and the two become fast friends.  We’ve seen François Cluzet before in the very first Claire Denis film, Chocolat (1988), and an earlier Olivier Assayas film, Late August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre)  (1998), where his enthusiasm for Turner’s music is genuine, inviting him back to his home where he meets his impressionable young pre-teen daughter Bérangère (Gabrielle Haker), currently living separately from her mother (Christine Pascal), who is in the midst of having an affair with another man.  Their friendship forms the basis of the film, as he helps prevent the police from sending him to a sanitarium following an arrest, and helps stabilize his life.  Even knowing how easily he gives in to temptation, as drugs and alcohol are the bane of his existence, Francis eliminates the influence of his money handlers and has the club pay him directly, while also helping him stay sober by allowing him to live in his home, returning to him a sense of empowerment.  Openly embracing a subtext of racism in America, telling a flashback story that was partly derived from Lester Young’s recollections of witnessing brutal beatings and racist abuse in the army, while also drawing upon other jazz artists who came before him, the mannerisms and quiet dignity that Dexter Gordon brings to bear are all his own, powerful enough, apparently, that none other than Marlon Brando wrote to him to say that it was the first time in fifteen years that he’d learned something new about acting.  This is beautifully captured in a sequence with Lonette McKee as former lover Darcey Leigh, who takes the stage to eloquently sing a song, How Long Has This Been Going On?  YouTube (4:05), where her white gardenias connect her to Billie Holiday and Lester Young.  He eventually decides it’s time to return back home to New York, see his old friends, and re-acquaint himself with his own estranged daughter, with Martin Scorsese making a cameo appearance as his motormouth agent, Goodley.  His daughter Chan (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) is invited to a club to hear her father dedicate a melancholic song for her, Dexter Gordon - Chan's song (from the movie) YouTube (3:09), which reflects the emotional distance that still remains between them, knowing he has not been there enough in her life.  Not long afterwards Francis receives word that Turner has died, with the final scene paying tribute to his musical legacy and influence, introduced by none other than Herbie Hancock at the Théâtre Antique de Lyon, 23 'Round Midnight · Ending Scene | Remember Dale Turner YouTube (3:46), while reels of Super 8 movies are watched by Francis and his daughter, becoming an elegy to his lasting memory.

The Room Next Door

 

Director Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar winning the Golden Lion at Venice

The director on the set

Almodóvar with his two actresses

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR               B+                                                                                      Spain  USA  France  (107 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: Pedro Almodóvar

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

This is the kind of thing that people in their 20’s will probably find turgid and endlessly insufferable, but people over 50 will find much more insightful, as it deals with the latter stages of life instead of the early years, a common subject of interest as people mature.  Think of final films by Ingmar Bergman with SARABAND (2003), Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986), or Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), but also Leo McCarey’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), Vittorio de Sica’s UMBERTO D (1952), Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), Cynthia Scott’s Strangers in Good Company (Le Fabuleux gang des sept) (1990), David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999), Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me (2003), Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006), Michael Haneke’s Amour (Love) (2012), and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Death is an ominous subject for anyone to approach, at any age, yet when you’re young, it’s just not something you think about unless you have to, like near fatal accidents or illnesses, or having to attend funerals.  Pedro Almodóvar is not a director one would associate with aging or death, as his bad boy charisma and youthful energy are seemingly boundless, yet he was inspired by the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through by American writer Sigrid Nunez, and while it’s about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months, offering many existential questions about impermanence and death, what stands out is the book’s conversation-heavy structure.  In this regard, the filmmaker was required to find two actresses who fit the mold, who could speak calmly and quietly through a stream of personal and mostly secluded conversations that capture our attention by exploring nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both.  We don’t often see these probing in-depth discussions on death and dying when it comes to adult friendships, revealing hidden truths we often shy away from, but Almodóvar directly faces several taboos of society such as the illegality of euthanasia or assisted suicide in forty out of fifty states in America, with only two states making it legal for non-residents, where his emotional connection to this forbidden terrain is undeniable, allowing the personal and political to intersect, expressed without a trace of sentimentality.  Spain legalized euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries in which any form of assisted dying is legal.  In Great Britain, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment, while euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder, where the maximum penalty is life imprisonment.  Choosing two New York-based writers, Ingrid (Julianne Moore, who won a Best Actress Academy Award for Still Alice in 2015), a successful autofiction novelist, reconnects with a lifelong friend Martha (Tilda Swinton, who won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for MICHAEL CLAYTON in 2008), a hard-nosed war reporter, who is in the final stages of cervical cancer, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (32 seconds).  Very few filmmakers, especially those who are male, have consistently captured the inner lives of women and the actresses playing them like Almodóvar, whose earlier film ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) was an affecting ode to the female spirit, dedicated “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers.  To my mother.”  In keeping with the novel, Almodóvar chose to make his first English-language feature, having made two earlier shorts in English, one of them starring Tilda Swinton, now channeling his inner Douglas Sirk in the brightly colored costumes and set designs, where you literally feel like you’re walking back in time directly into a Douglas Sirk film, and since Julianne Moore was already in Todd Haynes’ FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002), an homage to Sirk films from the 50’s like All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), that’s not entirely unexpected, yet everything that we’ve come to appreciate about Almodóvar is on display here, where a heightened sense of artifice has always been present in his work.

The leading light of contemporary Spanish cinema, Almodóvar’s characteristic splashes of vibrant color and bold melodramatic flourishes are everpresent at every turn, though this feels more tightly compressed due to the severity of the subject matter, adopting a more introspective and sober tone, as the weight of mortality is carried on both of their shoulders, told with a biting wit and a bold intellectual curiosity, along with an appreciation for an empathetic ear, adopting a very literary feel, while also including a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954).  Both actresses, by the way, have a history of working front and center for extraordinary queer filmmakers, Julianne Moore with Todd Haynes, and Tilda Swinton first with Derek Jarman and then with Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so their choice to grace the screen feels appropriate.  Winner of the Golden Lion (1st place) at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, with Almodóvar acknowledging in his acceptance speech, “As directors, we are privileged to be the first witness when a miracle occurs in front of the camera,” this is a film that examines mortality through the lens of human frailty, as we have two women who couldn’t be more different.  A caring and compassionate woman, Ingrid responds to a reader at a heavily populated book signing in Manhattan’s Rizzoli Bookstore, with the reader questioning whether writing the book changed her perceptions, “In the prologue, you say you wrote this book in order to better understand and accept death,” to which she responds that she’s still afraid of death, “It feels unnatural to me.  I can’t accept that something alive has to die.”  It’s only through these readers that Ingrid learns Martha is seriously ill in a nearby hospital, as the two haven’t spoken to each other in years, losing contact after Ingrid moved to Paris for a few years, though they worked together for Paper magazine in the 80’s, during the “party girl” phases of their lives, sharing, at different times, the same sexually volcanic boyfriend (John Turturro, who appears later with Ingrid, actually quoting a line from Almodóvar’s 1988 film WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN), and may have even been lovers, but that didn’t last, yet they’ve remained lifelong friends.  The visit in the hospital is heartening, as she’s clearly welcomed, but Martha informs her, “I swing between euphoria and depression,” concluding “Survival feels almost disappointing.”  Something of a force of nature, fiercely independent and bluntly direct, hard and self-centered by nature, exhibiting no signs of self-pity, having a complicated and distant relationship with her only daughter Michelle (also played by Swinton), though with all the chemotherapy drugs filtering through her system, still lingering long afterwards, she doesn’t have the same mental sharpness, becoming more forgetful, losing focus, where the blend between reality and dreams is intermixed, causing extreme internal anguish, “I’ve been reduced to very little of myself.”  Yet our eye can’t help looking out the window at this enormous, picture-perfect New York City skyline, impeccably framed, exquisitely shot by Eduard Grau, where you wonder what it costs to be in a place like that, as it’s like no hospital room we have ever seen, where it’s idyllic in so many ways, with freshly cut flowers by the bedside, but then the crushing reality hits like a ton of bricks with the real reason why she’s there.  It’s just so Sirkian, a women’s drama with melodramatic hysteria reduced to minimalist theater, never depressing with all the eye-popping color, with occasional moments of unexpected humor.  Death is an unseen character in this suffocatingly embalmed chamber drama, as its ghostly presence is always hovering nearby, where both women have a fragile relationship with death that evolves over time, yet the core of their humanity is everpresent, a shining light continually elevating the material from the shadows.  The other aspect of the film is the intense, non-stop musical score by Alberto Iglesias, who has composed the music of every single Almodóvar feature since THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), where the sensuously provocative music is often the core of the films, most especially TALK TO HER (2002), with a remastered 12-CD edition of those compositions released in 2020, as the music literally plays throughout the entire film, except for a few moments near the end, so the entire composition is about as long as a Mahler symphony.           

Perhaps the most intriguing elements of the film are the artistic references, so while the film is essentially about dying, and doing so on your own terms, it’s also about the living, where these references are bridges from the past to the present and even into the future.  As the two of them head out of town into upstate New York around Woodstock (actually shot at Casa Szoke in the mountains just outside Madrid, Szoke House: The 'Silent' Hero of Almodóvar's Film), Martha has chosen a state-of-the-art residence to rent for a month, literally immersed in nature, deep in the woods in an idyllic, dream-like location where glass walls make the inside and outside merge, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR | Official Clip YouTube (34 seconds), with designs to end it all in a completely unorthodox manner, one that challenges the right of the living to take their own lives, especially under these terms, as all Martha has to expect is an excruciatingly slow and painful decline, so she constructs her own timeline, which may, in fact, be illegal.  Viewers are also aware that, starting at least with the powerfully autobiographical Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria) (2019), followed by the equally compelling Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) (2021), arguably his most political work that unearths ghosts of the past, Almodóvar himself has been wrestling with his own mortality.  Without getting into the specifics (“You can find almost anything on the dark web”), let’s just say that it’s a perplexing moral dilemma that continues to haunt the living, especially bypassing the authority of religion and law enforcement.  And while they bide their time, they renew their friendship through some of the most intimately revealing observations, none more prominent than Martha’s word-for-word remembrance of the final words in the James Joyce short story The Dead, a monument of literature that was also made into a stellar movie by John Huston in 1987, working from a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank (Huston didn’t live to see his final film, released several months after his death), directing his own daughter Angelica Huston, yet what’s so memorable about that film is the unforgettable ending, where the poetic power of the words mix so perfectly with the sublime imagery of quietly falling snow, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:18).  And they watch a DVD of the film one night, after spending the entire night viewing the hilarious Buster Keaton comedy SEVEN CHANCES (1925) and the melodramatic tale of doomed love in Max Ophüls’ LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948), finally ending with the Huston film at sunrise just as a new day is about to begin, an apt metaphor.  The Nunez book is filled with plenty of references to other literary and artistic works, but Almodóvar chooses his own distinct set of references that are not in the book, and they are each rife with meaning and context, like a window into the souls of these complex women.  Ingrid tells Martha that she is planning a book on Dora Carrington (who is mentioned in the book, but Almodóvar invents a different conversation), a painter affiliated with the Bloomsbury Group that included novelist Virginia Woolf, openly bisexual and known for her many love affairs, who agreed to marry Ralph Partridge, not for love but to secure the 3-way relationship, as she was obsessed by the unrequited love from gay writer Lytton Strachey, becoming distraught by his death from cancer, dying by suicide two months later at age 38.  While there are visual references of Edward Hopper’s paintings, most notably People in the Sun | Smithsonian American Art Museum, by the end, the glamor element for Martha is right out of a magazine photoshoot, where there’s even a cinematic reference to the red lipstick sequence in Powell and Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) (Sequence Analysis “Lipstick” in Black Narcissus), and, of course, there’s an inevitable shot that mirrors Bergman’s Persona (1966), where after death there’s a symbolic transference of identity that resembles a rebirth, with Ingrid inheriting Martha’s strength and fortitude, as she is literally transformed by the experience.  Almodóvar adds his own spin on it in the final memorable frames as once again the snow drifts down, with the filmmaker utilizing Joyce as the narrator of his own haunting elegy.