‘The Eddy’ Exposes What ‘La La Land’s’ Damien Chazelle Still Doesn’t Get About Jazz
The best of the new Netflix show The Eddy, about an eponymous jazz club and its multicultural house band in Paris, is not at all in Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s first two episodes (he is also an executive producer of the series, along with writer Jack Thorne and lead actor Andre Holland). Instead, the show’s brief streak of brilliance can be found in Divines director Houda Benyamina’s following two episodes. It’s Benyamina, and not Chazelle, who understands what jazz can and should do, and is able to advance the show well beyond its tedious crime subplot and into the sublime—that is, of jazz music’s inspiration borne from collectivity.
Benyamina’s episodes, “Amira” and “Jude,” center on two spectacular French actors: Leïla Bekhti plays Amira (Bekhti’s real-life husband Tahar Rahim plays her husband on the show, Farid, who is The Eddy club’s co-owner), and Jisca Kalvanda, who had a supporting role in Divines, plays bass player Jude’s (real-life musician Damian Nueva) old love Habiba. Benyamina—being both French and, by the white colonial French establishment’s standards, not French enough (having been born to Moroccan parents)—harmonizes her knowledge of Paris with her understanding of people. This makes her a great depicter of jazz itself—of how it can move people, transform rooms and landscapes, and demand that musicians bring their most generous selves to the fore, and not their most competitive or egoistic, as Chazelle’s own direction indicates.
But The Eddy’s other owner, Elliott Udo (Holland), does have an ego, or at least an agenda he refuses to share. Udo is perhaps the world’s greatest living jazz pianist, but he doesn’t perform anymore; instead, he’s the house band’s bandleader, composing music and writing lyrics to be sung by the fierce and mercurial Maja (Joanna Kulig, of Cold War fame, does much to elevate a half-written character). A black American enmeshed in the black and North African banlieues, Udo is searching for something that remains unclear for much of the season. Elliott’s daughter, Julie (a very good Amandla Stenberg), has left her white, rich Upper East Side-dwelling mother behind to join her broke and inattentive father in this new world. While Chazelle’s episodes enthusiastically plunge into a grainy, handheld cinema vérité aesthetic as if he’s trying on a new attitude, Benyamina’s episodes find the spontaneity in the environment itself, regarding every inch of the city—from the public to the private, the affluent to the neglected—with reciprocal energy.
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