"Autour de minuit" ("'Round Midnight") is the story of a Frenchman's passion for jazz, and for a sax player. Or two Frenchmen, rather, for it takes a passionate director to make such a film.
Francis Borler (played by François Cluzet) is a Parisian artist and a jazz fan who finally meets his idol, sax player Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon), who is struggling with alcohol and drugs, money problems and a generally crappy life. The young Frenchman decides to help him, and the two of them become friends.
This movie is a must-see for any jazz fan: not only is the story about jazz, and partly inspired by real-life sax Lester Young, but the guest star list is particularly impressive, with such musicians as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter or John McLaughlin, and obviously Dexter Gordon himself, sharing some of the best moments of jazz on the screen.
But this is also a film for the layman. Dexter Gordon's rendering of Dale Turner is especially moving (on a par with, and arguably even better than, Forest Whitaker's impersonation of Bird in Eastwood's film a couple of years later).
Vaurien's Reviews
Displaying all 4 Review
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"This Is Spinal Tap" is the stuff that legendary films are made of: it is hilarious, has memorable quotes ("These go to eleven" having become a cliché among metalheads), pokes fun at itself as much as at its characters, shows real underlying affection for the bands parodied in it, and is above all the perfect occasion for a heavy metal quiz.
This "rockumentary" follows the career of Spinal Tap, a British heavy metal band, through its ups and downs, most if not all of the anecdotes and mishaps featured in the movie having really happened to real-life bands (have fun spotting all the references to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and so on... or the Beatles, for that matter!).
Another notable aspect of Spinal Tap is the actors' performances. Not only is their Cockney accent brilliantly done, they actually play the music, and Spinal Tap has had a real existence on stage... without a Stonehenge decor. -
The plot —a rather simple affair of gang succession that has to be kept a secret from the innocent Patricia— is probably not what made this movie what it has been for decades to the French public: an absolute must-see, one of the classics, lines from which can be heard quoted on a regular basis. Fernand, a retired mobster now running an up-to-date farm in Southern France, is called back to Paris and the underworld by the death of his friend and former associate Louis le Mexicain. Against his will, Fernand finds himself burdened with a sacred mission: he has to manage his friend's business. He has especially promised to take care of the dead man's teenage daughter, who must not know what kind of life her late father, and her newly-met "uncle", had, and have...
It is rather the brilliance of the dialogues, and the impeccable performance of all of the actors, that are striking in this film. Michel Audiard's use of old-fashioned underworld slang, playful mixing of registers and satirical cynicism —all of them specialties of his, which have made him one of the most famous French script writers, on a par with Jacques Prévert— certainly do the trick, and his wonderful dialogues are perfectly carried home by Ventura, Blier, Blanche and Dalban. Simply timeless.
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There are so many reasons why this film had to become a classic.
Not only does it introduce Malcolm McDowell, of A Clockwork Orange fame;
Not only is it spoofed in The Meaning of Life;
Not only does it sum up the spirit of 1968, in a way that few films have managed to encapsulate in only one and a half hour;
Not only is this a brilliant counterweight to films like Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Browning Version or Dead Poets Society, with all their bittersweet vision of British public schools;This movie gives you a reflection on what youth, education, and growing up mean in a way only the late 60s could, and Lindsay Anderson was way ahead of his time when he decided to make a film where no one can tell reality from imagination, or what the ideological message — if there is one —might be.
