Bertrand Tavernier, the veteran French director of a series of acclaimed films, including A Sunday in the Country, Round Midnight and These Foolish Things, died at the age of 79. The news was announced by the Institut Lumière, the cinematographic organization of which he was president. No cause of death was provided.
Tavernier’s production was prolific: he made his directorial debut in 1974 with O Relojoeiro de São Paulo and worked continuously until 2013, when he released his latest feature film, The Minister of France. He also picked up a wide variety of material, from crime and noir, to comedy, jazz and historical drama.
Born in Lyon in 1941, Tavernier was the son of magazine editor René Tavernier, whose anti-Nazi principles would greatly influence Bertrand. Like the generation of French New Wave directors who preceded him slightly, Tavernier grew up as an obsessive about cinema; having moved to Paris after the war, he founded his own magazine and got a job as an assistant director for Jean-Pierre Melville in the 1961 film Léon Morin, Prêtre. He himself admitted that he was so bad as AD that Melville made him the publicist for his successor, Le Doulos. It was in this role that Tavernier left his first mark in the film industry, working as a publicist on a series of New Wave classics, including Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard and Cleo from 5 to 7. by Agnés Varda. “We were the first cinema publicists who were moviegoers – we only accepted films we liked,” he told the Guardian in 2008.
However, it was always Tavernier’s ambition to step in and he returned to Lyon to make an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel, The Watchmaker of Everton, starring Philippe Noiret, the dreary-looking actor who would later become a regular collaborator. Noiret appeared in Tavernier’s next film, the period drama Let Joy Reign Supreme about an 18th century rebellion against the crown, which won four Caesars, the French equivalent of the Oscar.
Tavernier’s interest in American police literature was demonstrated with films such as Coup de Torchon (1981), adapted from Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, and starred in Noiret, alongside Isabelle Huppert; was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. However, Tavernier’s greatest international breakthrough was A Sunday in the Country (1984), a drama set at the end of the century about an elderly painter whose family comes to visit; he won wide acclaim and a series of awards, including best director at the Cannes film festival. Tavernier followed with what remains without a doubt his best known film: Round Midnight, released in 1986, which starred Dexter Gordon as a jazz musician struggling to survive in Paris and New York.
Tavernier had more success with Life and Nothing But, with Noiret as a military investigator after the First World War, and then with These Foolish Things, for which he convinced Dirk Bogarde to leave retirement for a drama about the relationship between a dying man and his daughter. screenwriter (played by Jane Birkin). In the 1990s, Tavernier made well-received police films L.627 and The Bait, as well as the brilliant swordsman Revenge of the Musketeers, starring Sophie Marceau. In 2002, Tavernier turned to the French film industry itself as the subject of Safe Conduct, based on a memoir by Jean Devaivre and focusing on the Nazi occupation. However, Devaivre disagreed with Tavernier, and the director was accused by French critics of attacking the New Wave.
In 2009, Tavernier finally realized his ambition to make a Hollywood thriller: the Louisiana In the Electric Mist set was adapted from a James Lee Burke novel and starring Tommy Lee Jones as Burke’s detective Dave Robicheaux. However, the experience was not a happy one; Tavernier told the Guardian that he “found everything more difficult than working in France” and, although the film was selected for the Berlin film festival, it was not released in theaters in the United States.
Back home, the breadth of Tavernier’s enthusiasm for cinema was demonstrated in his extensive 2016 documentary, My Journey Through French Cinema, in which he expanded filmmakers such as Melville, Jacques Becker and Robert Bresson.