The life of Charlie Parker is Christ-like, to the point of dying at the age of 34. Clint Eastwood does not insist on his youth and origins. He concentrates on the mature musician from the moment he gets into the profession (with a cabaret card) to the moment when he dies and gets out of it, still with his cabaret card, at least in his dying heart. Charlie Parker represents a very typical case. The musician is stepping out of real life with his music. He steps into another world where the weight of the body and the ethics of the mind do not exist any more, and that's why his music is luminous and so entrancing. We are literally swallowed up by that swinging force because it is from an out world that is beyond pure comprehension and that is only to be enjoyed. But to produce that joy, that beauty and that light the musician has to burn his own life slowly but surely till death ensues. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, wild living and no regularity at all, insanity too of the psychotic type quite often are the companions and the tools of this musician and even the few friends he meets along the way, both other musicians, or women and men who just love him are not enough to stop the fire that consumes him, especially because without that consumption that burns him inside out he would not be able to play music, to compose music, to create music. Clint Eastwood really renders that psychotic world with a force and a power that makes the film too short even if it were two hours longer. We would like to just drown in that music and in that soul that feeds us that music as if it were the honey of paradise and the blood of life. But every single drop he gives us is a drop he loses in his veins. Till they are dry and the heart empty. A musician is always in a way committing a self-sacrifice of his life on the altar of our pleasure.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID