'Round Midnight

Tavernier's offbeat love letter to bebop gets the best jazz film award since Sven Klang's Combo. Night after night in the pouring rain, a young Frenchman (Cluzet) squats outside a Parisian jazz club, listening to the sublime saxophone of one 'Dale Turner'. Since Turner, a shambling bear of a man, is troubled by the jazzman's classic demons of drink and drugs, it is not long before the young man has befriended him, rescued him from cheap flophouses, and installed him in his own flat, where kindness and devotion achieve some kind of advance over the depredations of the jazz life. The film reeks of the authentic stuff of jazz, smoky with atmosphere and all as blue as a Gauloise packet. Dale Turner, as played by Dexter Gordon, seems to be an amalgam of Bud Powell and Lester Young, but the private, rueful dignity that he brings to bear is all his own. CPea.