A deep salaam to American jazzmen, with a bit of bootlicking thrown in, by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier. The venerable Dexter Gordon, with a ponderous raspy speaking voice and a mellifluous supple saxophone (as well as an artful method of blowing out a birthday candle), plays a fictional composite of Bud Powell, Lester Young, et al., called "Dale Turner," a shambling old wreck in a porkpie hat, with a high demand and low tolerance for booze. And François Cluzet, a sort of physical composite of young Dustin Hoffman, young William Schallert, and young Biff Elliot, is the French commercial artist who worships the ground he walks on, and takes it upon himself to steer him from ruin. The period, place, and atmosphere are roughly the same as in Martin Ritt's Paris Blues (1961), a film undoubtedly more corny than this one, but in its contemporaneousness, more urgent and courageous, too. Tavernier's is unfailingly tasteful and well-crafted, but cautious and slow. Just as his Sunday in the Country tried to evoke the life of a late 19th-century painter through Impressionistic lighting and whatnot, this noodling, circuitous narrative, shot in smoky grays, frosty blues, dusty browns, could be seen to evoke the life of a bebopper in the style of a blues number. That, of course, could also be seen as an awfully literal-minded thing to do, but Tavernier is a literal, literary, bookish sort of artist, with a wide streak of sententiousness and sentimentalism, held in check by the aforementioned tastefulness and caution. With Lonette McKee, John Berry, and Martin Scorsese. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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