An American in Paris
The Eddy excavates deep-rooted emotion and sets it to a powerful jazz soundtrack
The Eddy Streaming, Netflix
Those familiar with the work of Damien Chazelle won’t be surprised to hear that his latest project centres on a jazz musician. The Eddy, a miniseries now streaming on Netflix, follows the Oscar-winning director’s Whiplash and La La Land in exploring the role music plays in the life of its main character, and how professional ambition affects his relationships, some loving and others fraught.
The Eddy follows an American in modern-day Paris: fictional pianist Elliot Udo (André Holland), now a struggling jazz club owner who becomes entangled in a crime plot.
Chazelle, who directed the first two episodes, had never worked in television. Most of the musicians had never acted. Holland, who only had a bit of piano experience, had to embody someone with a successful career’s worth.
“By the time we got on set, everyone was scared of something,” Chazelle says. “André was scared of not coming across like a real musician, the musicians were scared of not coming across as real actors. It was going to be a hodgepodge ... The whole cast kind of agreed to jump off the cliff together.”
They leaned on each other, as do their characters. While the band members often fall out of sync in their personal lives, they thrive onstage at Elliot’s club, from which the show gets its title. Critics have pointed to the performance scenes as the strongest, showcasing songs written by Glen Ballard, known for co-writing and producing Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album, Jagged Little Pill.
Within the show, Elliot is also a strict bandleader who presides over practices with a meticulous ferocity. He struggles to keep his life intact, dealing with the external pressures of a failing business, an on-and-off relationship with singer Maja (Joanna Kulig), and the sudden death of a close friend. When his daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg) arrives, Elliot is forced to look inward and grapple with his persistent sense of grief over losing his son, and with his failure to show up for Julie in the aftermath.
The role called for a combination of what audiences have seen Holland accomplish before: an excavation of deep-rooted emotion, as in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, set to the frenetic tone of High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh’s film about a quick-moving sports agent. Chazelle adds that, with even the subtlest of looks, Holland can relay “that quiet kind of withholding, that coldness, that raw pain; but also (retains) the ability to be tender, to be sweet, that yearning to connect to more than he can. Those were the core tenets of the character, for us.”
As a co-executive producer, Holland was taken by how many cultures collide in the city’s music scene, traceable North African influences mingling with what black Americans embedded there after the Second World War.
Holland says he and Stenberg were passionate about honouring the contributions of those people.
“If we’re going to tell a story about jazz and have two black characters in the centre of it, I felt strongly that we damn well better recognize the real people who made this possible,” Holland says.
Elliot’s band doesn’t perform covers, as Ballard wrote enough original music to sustain eight episodes’ worth. But their music pays homage to the vibrant culture black Americans in Paris helped create. It’s these performances that bring The Eddy to life, the camera whirling around the club.
“There was something about stepping behind the camera and looking at these players that felt both endlessly compelling and cathartic,” says Chazelle, who pursued jazz drumming in his youth before pivoting to film. “It started with the music, and it dictated the whole esthetic of the show, really.”
As the first of the four directors to helm a pair of episodes, Chazelle set the series’ “looser shooting style” in place. Holland says working on these scenes was “really dope.”