TALENT Near the end of the first episode of The
Eddy, the Eiffel Tower appears in the
distance, hazy in the summer light—the only instance in
the eight-part series in which the monument is visible.
The rest of postcard Paris is also markedly absent
from this Netflix drama about a struggling American
jazz-club owner, Elliot (André Holland), and his
daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenberg), a disaffected teen
dealing with substance-abuse issues who moves to
Paris to live with him. The characters in this show—
nightclub owners navigating the underworld of petty
financial crime, jazz musicians caring for elderly
relatives, bartenders who beatbox in abandoned
garages—reside in the shadowier parts of the City of
Light, and each of them is nursing a distinct kind
of loss: son, husband, brother, father, friend.
“There’s this mix in Paris,” says Damian Chazelle
from his home in Los Angeles. “You get one glimpse of
a Haussmann-era apartment building and you’re
thrown into the iconography of plastic Paris. But then
right next to it there’s a graffiti-sprayed wall that looks
more like Eastern Europe, and down another corner
suddenly you feel like you’re in North Africa,” says the
La La Land and Whiplash writer and director, who
is half French and spent part of his childhood living in
the 13th arrondissement. Playwright Jack Thorne
(Broadway’s Harry Potter), who penned most of the
show, was particularly interested in the Périphérique,
the road that lassos Paris, separating the central,
tourist-friendly city center from its more working-class
semi-suburbs: “I wanted to do a show that sits on the
edge of that ring road about the relationship with those
outside and those inside.”
The result is a work that is not about “white people in
striped shirts and berets,” as Stenberg, who starred in
The Hate U Give, puts it. Her character’s arrival in Paris
coincides with a violent crime outside the nightclub
(The Eddy). What follows are the twin quests for justice
and rapprochement between a father and a daughter.
The cast is amplified by a trio of European stars: French
actor Tahar Rahim, who plays Elliot’s business partner
and friend; Leila Bekhti, Rahim’s on- and offscreen wife;
and Polish actress Joanna Kulig. Nonactors from
the lower-income suburbs, the banlieues, and the housing
developments, les cités, were also cast in many of the
supporting roles—“the sort of faces that you don’t often
see in Parisian-set movies or shows,” says Chazelle.
While he oversaw the first two episodes, subsequent
episodes, with greater focus on the French-Algerian
characters, were directed by Cannes’ Camera d’Or winner
Houda Benyamina, who was born in France to Moroccan
parents, and Moroccan director Laila Marrakchï.
“I think that the show speaks to the multiculturalism of
Paris,” says the 21-year-old Stenberg.
While The Eddy underlines the complexities of
contemporary Paris, it also bears the stylistic influences
of the past: 1960s French New Wave classics such as
Breathless and Band of Outsiders, and Jean Rouch and
Edgar Morin’s 1961 pioneering cinéma
ben green
(Ben Green)
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