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Bertrand Tavernier, the seasoned French director of a host of acclaimed films including A Country Sunday, Round Midnight and These Stupid Things, has died at the age of 79. The news has been announced by the Lumière Institute, a film organization of which he was president. No cause of death was given.
Tavernier’s production is prolific: he made his directorial debut in 1974 with L’Horloger de St Paul and worked continuously until 2013, when he released his last feature film, The French Minister. He has also taken in a wide variety of material, from crime and noir, to comedy, jazz and historical drama.
Born in Lyon in 1941, Tavernier is the son of magazine publisher René Tavernier, whose anti-Nazi principles will greatly influence Bertrand. Like the generation of French New Wave directors that slightly preceded it, Tavernier grew up as an obsessive film; settled in Paris after the war, he founded his own magazine and managed to land a job as assistant director to Jean-Pierre Melville on the 1961 film Léon Morin, Prêtre. By his own admission, he was so bad as an AD that Melville instead made him the publicist for his follow-up, Le Doulos. It was in this role that Tavernier made his first mark in the film industry, working as a publicist on a series of New Wave classics, including Le contempt by Jean-Luc Godard and Cleo de 5 à 7 by Agnés Varda. . who were moviegoers – we only accepted the movies we liked, ”he told The Guardian in 2008.
However, Tavernier’s ambition has always been to embark on directing and returned to Lyon to do an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel L’Horloger d’Everton, with Philippe Noiret, the dismal-looking actor who would 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 Oscars.
Tavernier’s interest in American detective literature was demonstrated with films such as Coup de Torchon (1981), adapted from Pop by Jim Thompson. 1280, and starred Noiret opposite Isabelle Huppert; it was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. However, Tavernier’s great international breakthrough was A Sunday in the Country (1984), a turn-of-the-century drama about an elderly painter whose family came to visit him; he won wide acclaim and a series of awards, including Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. Tavernier followed up with what remains arguably 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 WWI, then These Foolish Things, for which he persuaded Dirk Bogarde to come out of retirement for a drama about the relationship between a dying man and his screenwriter daughter (played by Jane Birkin). In the 90s, Tavernier made well-received detective films L.627 and The Bait, as well as the brilliant swashbuckler 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 focused on the Nazi occupation. However, Devaivre fell out with Tavernier and the director found himself accused by French critics of attacking the New Wave.
In 2009, Tavernier finally realized his ambition to make a Hollywood thriller: the Louisiana set In the Electric Mist was adapted from a James Lee Burke novel and played Tommy Lee Jones as Burke’s detective Dave Robicheaux. However, the experience was not a happy one; Tavernier told The Guardian he “found anything more difficult than working in France,” and although the film was selected for the Berlin Film Festival, it did not hit US theaters.
Back home, the breadth of Tavernier’s enthusiasm for cinema was showcased in his 2016 feature-length documentary My Journey Through French Cinema, in which he developed filmmakers such as Melville, Jacques Becker and Robert Bresson.
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