The world is inside of nothing

It's funny how the world is inside of nothing. I mean, you have your heart and your soul inside of you. Babies are inside of their mothers. Fish are out there in the water. But the world is inside nothing. I don't know if I like this or not but you better write it down.

I just watched Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film Round Midnight again for the first time in nearly thirty years. This scene, in which saxophonist Dexter Gordon, playing a fictional jazz legend named Dale Turner, philosophizes while a friend's daughter plays on a French beach, is one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's a bit hokey, of course, but that's show business.

I can readily understand why a black filmmaker like Spike Lee had issues with a film like this, and there's much that could be said regarding its rehearsal of cultural clichés about black men who are in one way or another damaged being sympathetically "minded" by whites, as well as about the portrayal of jazz musicians as oracles rather than as disciplined, skilled professional musicians (see Cortázar's "The Pursuer," which may have been one of the inspirations for this film), but on the other hand this is one of the few fictional feature films from the second half of the twentieth century in which jazz musicians are actually played by jazz musicians rather than by professional actors. In addition to Gordon, who reportedly contributed to the development of the script, the cast includes Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and other luminaries. The music is splendid (and plentiful), Gordon and co-star François Cluzet are splendid, and you have this scene on the beach, all of which ought to count for something.