Story Movie
Night jazz club Blue Note, Paris, 1959. An elderly gentleman approaches the stage with an unsteady gait, shaking hands touching a saxophone, he is drunk. But as he begins to play, the audience freezes, even the bartender behind the bar dances to the rhythm of jazz, and the magical sounds become audible on a Parisian night street. There, on the street in the rain is a young man who cannot pass by the club, he is also enchanted, he is in love with the playing of an old saxophonist. For a short time fate will connect these two people, although the maestro of jazz has only a little time to live.
Review 4K Movie
Jazz is not just the rhythms of the night, not a way of thinking or even a style of music, but a way of life. Jazz is an improvisation of the growing flow of inner pain that finds its way out through instrumental beats. Jazz is like a charming midnight stranger you don't know what to expect. While America roared on a rock 'n' roll wave of positivity, and Martin Luther King was nurturing his “dream” against hardened racism, the final 50's saw a mass exodus of jazzmen to Europe. Failing to find a response from conservatives, progressive music went to France, rightly believing that in the old world skin color is not a sentence, and melodic “heart-to-heart talk” will not leave anyone indifferent. After all, in loneliness it is so difficult to find someone who could just listen and understand ...
Such a story happened in 1959, when Paris native Francis Powdras came across the legendary keyboardist and one of the bebop pioneers Bud Powell in one of the capital's clubs. The meeting turned into friendship, and the subsequent changes in the lives of the musician and the designer of movie posters - the basis for the movie “'Round Midnight”. For the sake of the mass audience, director Bertrand Tavernier redrew the hypostasis of the protagonist, correcting the peculiar to more classical music piano to the icon of jazz - saxophone. It was entrusted to the giant (literally and figuratively) Decter Gordon, who had already acquired the status of a revered figure in the world of music during his lifetime.
And although the stylistic parable is now filled with the lurching of the saxophone, the creative agony and fading soul of the genius in the cut remain unchanged. Talented saxophonist Dale Turner is bored with the blazing multicolored lights of New York's luxurious skyscrapers that spread out from the outside of a sparsely furnished room with cheap wallpaper and tattered curtains. In this world, the wrong people always get paid. Alcohol-fueled injustice is a brief moment of freedom from the horrifying reality of a rusty cage where creativity is snuffed out like an open bottle of champagne. And so change bursts into the scraggly reality and the giant gloss of skyscrapers is replaced by narrow French streets. But the out-of-fashion porkpie hat, the charming slowness in his flabby body and the graying sideburns cutting into his swarthy face remained with him. So did the weariness of life, which was still muted by wine. And so he languidly sits down on a stool on staggered legs and the magic aroma of crisp saxophone beats wafts through the smoky hall of the decrepit club, splashing with the elegance of drunk cabernet sauvignon. Fermented reserves of inspiration poison the rudiments of soulful outpouring. Down with the hall full of “duty” applause because it's “the best”. Life from a new leaf, but the handwriting tiredly draws a hopeless reality ...
And outside the hearth of art, lurking at the ajar window, drops of virtuoso sounds warm the lonely François. Poverty is not a vice, even when his miserable earnings from his job as a poster designer are barely enough to support his daughter. He who has eaten a pud of salt not only appreciates honey more, but knows the real price of the symphony of the night. And it doesn't matter what it's about - rent for an apartment, breaths between volleys of notes or portions of “fire water”. Halfway to the abyss, through blind applause, François's sincere gratitude builds an invisible ladder to the top. Separately they are wreckage, two shadows by the water, unable to reach the dream. But the main language of happiness is mutual aid. She builds a new, transformed universe. The powerful sound of the tenor saxophone is replaced by the improvisational melody of the soprano. The music flows from the gloomy nooks and crannies to the bright spaces of the recording studios. As in a fairy tale, cramped furnishings on the outskirts of the city grow to multi-roomed chalets with peeling walls but high ceilings. And when the memory of the past resurrects forgotten images, on their foundations are built new, even more bizarre. That's how masterpieces are born. This is how the cherished, distant world becomes a part of the environment, dressed up in other - bright and saturated - colors.
The emphasis on Turner's real-life fictionalized biography undermines the concept of “'Round Midnight”. On the one hand, Tavernier revels in the opportunity to explore the idea of human energy interacting through a creative tandem, but on the other hand, he fails himself in obeying the biographical musical reference. Because of this, “'Round Midnight” is a bit overdone in the egotism of Dale Turner's figure, which, however, does not make the movie a reproduction of a painting with paint splattered on the canvas. On the contrary, it is a dying breed of works that one would like not to break down into sound-note-picture components, but simply to isolate oneself from the frantic world of selfies and gadgets, and forget oneself in the vibrating beats of the screen Dexter Gordon, while the dawn is still far away....
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