Jazz films have a tendency to let you know that they’re very much about jazz. The medium—and the clichés associated with it—can become a hook upon which a picture is hung. Story is secondary, as well as relationships; the point will often feel like we’re being told that this is a form of music we should care about and here are some examples of it, as though there’s no way that everything won’t be new to us. Jazz itself is the centerpiece, not the way that life exists in relation to jazz, flowing through it, fostering it, and vice versa.
Whenever I watch Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film —newly reissued by Criterion on DVD and Blu-ray, with all of the bells-and-whistles and cinema-loving care one associates with that company—I think that this is a movie that gets it, by which I mean jazz, and jazz at its best, when jazz is more than jazz.
