Hit Or Miss: The Eddy
If we peel away Damien Chazelle’s skin, it would be a surprise if he doesn’t turn out to be a closeted jazz musician. The Oscar winning writer-director returns to create another project about jazz, after Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016) summoned major success in Hollywood. This time around, The Eddy, a Netflix series, marks Chazelle’s another attempt at portraying a jazz musician’s journey, only with a different—more appropriate—protagonist. Ryan Gosling’s character in La La Land was criticized as a white savior wanting to preserve the black roots of jazz, while John Legend played the sellout partner. The Eddy stars André Holland as an American jazz musician trying to survive in Paris. If La La Land translates some of the basic concepts in loving jazz (structure, past v.s future, love & lost), The Eddy explores the everyday life of a hustling musician.
As soon as the trailer unfolds, we can sense a recognizable tone from Chazelle. Maja (Joanna Kulig, the Polish actress who recently starred in Cold War) is performing on stage accompanied by a band. Elliot Udo (André Holland) sits in the darkness of the club, admiring with a cigarette in hand. Oh, how very Paris! While we recognize the old, there is a sense of modern-day Paris that the audience is unfamiliar with: something fast, something colorful under the darkness, and something incredibly raw.
Elliot finds out that his partner Farid (Tahar Rahim) is involved in some questionable business, that owes an unsure amount of money to a group that assaulted Elliot in his own club, The Eddy. As it turns out, despite having put everything they own into the club, it is still failing. Elliot’s daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenberg), pays a surprise visit, asking her father to come home to New York, a place he no longer feels belonged. The financial dilemma in the club drizzles down to an artistic one, the band seems to be on different paths. Everything starts to boil down to one problem, “we can’t afford to be bad; we can’t afford to be empty.” Money, or the lack thereof, is strangling this New Yorker in Paris and everyone in his life; Elliot is grasping for air.
The deliciousness that oozes out of this trailer, accompanied by a characteristic soundscape, is revealed by brief but deep moments those characters share with each other and on their own. The series’ dialogue, like its cast, consists of different languages: English, French, Arabic and Polish. When jazz music meets its characters afloat, it reminds the world that music is always migrating and changing the life within. This perhaps is what’s missing in Chazelle’s La La Land, a white-centric love song to Los Angeles, a city of many other subcultures: recognizing the mismatch between the Hollywood fantasy and the reality. When representation stands as the hot topic of new Hollywood, what needs to be decolonized lies both on the surface and within. When the cover is fixed and lifted, the audience is confronted with the ugly truth—the next step of healing is to confront pain, which will be more challenging and enriching than the movement before.
The core of The Eddy is not a carbon copy of that struggle, but the spirit of salvaging jazz music carries it along. Elliot doesn’t just have a hard time with money, his personal and artistic life are also at a tipping point. The series won’t be about how to survive Parisian loan sharks, but the financial struggle sets off everything else that might changes Elliot for good. There is a difference between La La Land and The Eddy, the struggle is approached from two different angles: one romanticizes a white pianist’s fantasy about owning his own jazz club and collides it with an actress on the rising, and the other focuses on the struggle of a club and the people that lie within. The band of people that are all passionate the idea of jazz, Paris, home, remain undistracted in this series.
The trailer perfectly demonstrates Chazelle’s taste, but whether or not his storytelling style fits television remains a question. The series potentially will be a slow-burn perfection, but unfit for viewers who are looking for a quick high. But that might just embodies a real experience visiting a jazz club: it takes time for the drama to warm up, and it takes a good audience to transcend the music. Whether or not it’s a good series, go with the flow, the story might takes us somewhere foreign and unexpected: Paris is always a good idea.
The series premiered on Netflix, May 8, 2020.