50 | Sight&Sound | May 2020
THE EDDYlabel Blue Note – but will no longer play on stage,
the first two episodes seeding this reticence by
connecting it to a traumatic backstory. Also introduced
in episode one is the band’s wayward singer Maja (Joanna
Kulig, who mesmerisingly proved her vocal skills in
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, 2013; and Cold War, 2018), El-
liot’s sometime ex. Another key figure is Julie (Amandla
Stenberg), his teenage daughter, newly arrived in town,
whose own psychological baggage is unpacked in an as-
tonishing second episode.
The series places us in a very mundane modern city- no smoky candlelit romance here, or evocations of
famous Paris venues like the Blue Note or New Morning.
Instead, The Eddy is a cavernous, functional warehouse-
style unit with heavy plastic industrial curtains sheeting
it off from the street, more like an arts workshop. There
are scenes set in the city’s 18th arrondissement, with its
Maghrebin population, and in a cité (housing estate),
where Elliot visits a North African band playing a jazz/
rap hybrid in a garage.
The Eddy’s music is played by The Eddy’s house band,
who really convince as working musicians, with their
part-improvised dialogue (there’s some testy backchat
about mouthpieces). With material written by Ballard
and the band’s pianist Randy Kerber, there are a few of
the expected torchy ballads, performed with moody
Franco-Polish inflections by Kulig, but when the band
hits the harder-edged material, some of it with razor-
sharp brass arrangements, things really take off. There’s
an especially good sequence in episode two, in which a
back-of-house encounter between Julie and barman Sim
(Adil Dehbi) is intercut with the music on stage, a torrent
of intense, fragmented free blowing.
Each episode focuses on a particular character, with
Elliot as the constant throughout, and Julie in the spot-
light for the second. That means that we get a first epi-
sode almost entirely in French, and a second in English
(there’s also dialogue in Arabic, and some Polish from
Maja), with a fair degree of improvisation in the acting
as well as the music. The narrative is canny: it starts off
promising a day-to-day realist melodrama about the mu-
sical life (it’s clear that players earn little, and Elliot and
Farid are anxious about keeping their venture afloat),
then takes something of a policier genre turn, with Elliot
haunted by a menacing presence who keeps turning up
in the street and on the Metro. There’s also a bold nar-
rative coup early on, when a key character is suddenly,
shockingly, withdrawn from play.
The acting, from a prestigious cast, is also terrific –
Rahim ebulliently charming and shifty as Farid; Leïla
Bekhti as his wife Amira, determined to raise her son
at a distance from the chaos; and Moonlight star Hol-
land nervy, internalised and keenly catching a note of
simmering anxiety and emotional fatigue. But the real
revelation is Amandla Stenberg, the young star of The
Hate U Give (2018), who enters the world of The Eddy
in episode one as a quiet observer, comically jet-lagged,
but alert enough to come across as more grounded than
her dad. In episode two, however, Stenberg explores the
damage in Julie’s psyche, to unnerving effect: there are
many emotional shifts to move through in one episode
but Stenberg pulls them off with audacity, candour and
extraordinary insightfulness.
However, Julie also features in an exuberant scene in
which she and Sim go on an impromptu sortie selling
coffee and sandwiches in an office building – a heady
interlude that recalls the breakneck breeziness of the
famous Paris dashes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part
(1964) and François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962); it’s also
the one moment in the show so far where you get a hint
of the insouciance of La La Land. Otherwise, Chazelle –
presumably establishing a tone for subsequent episodes- adopts a freer style than he’s shown before, the loose
handheld naturalism of much of The Eddy suggesting
that he may have been taking notes on Abdellatif Ke-
chiche films, such as Couscous (2007). There’s one very
Chazellian note too, for admirers, although you suspect
that Jack Thorne, or the actors, might have placed it as a
wink to one of the director’s signature scenes. It comes
when Elliot, putting his band through their paces, starts
losing his patience and raging, playing the hyper-critical
taskmaster: shades of the martinet teacher played in
Whiplash by J.K. Simmons, when Elliot tells one of the
musicians, “You’re dragging, brother!” On the evidence
so far, dragging is something that The Eddy can’t be ac-
cused of.
The Eddy is on Netflix from 8 May
Jazz fans who
were vexed
by Damien
Chazelle’s
previous films
should be
impressed by
the way he has
loosened up
and captured a
modern picture
of the music
KIND OF BLUE
Moonlight star André
Holland as Elliot Udo, with
Joanna Kulig, in The Eddy
(below); and Ludovic Louis as
Ludo, who plays the trumpet
for the in-house band (above)