The new Netflix series The Eddy is what we meant years ago when we described something as “a foreign film.”
In contrast to American films, which tended to be brightly lit and relatively fast-moving, “foreign films” were moody, often dimly lit, and filled with characters who seemed unable to fully explain what was on their troubled minds.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t apply to all foreign films. Or all American films. But The Eddy, which becomes available Friday on Netflix, is deeply moody, introspective, and deliberately paced – all the things our current incoming generation of movie and TV watchers has supposedly rejected.
Imagine their surprise if they watch it and discover that drawn-out scenes filled with fragmentary thoughts and conversations can make a story enticing.
Elliot Udo (André Holland) is a renowned jazz trumpet player who has, like any number of real-life American musicians before him, moved to Paris and come to consider it his home.
He’s now trying to establish a whole life there, opening a jazz club with his friend and fellow musician Farid (Tahar Rahim). Farid isn’t quite in Elliot’s league as a musician, but he’s eager to do the nuts and bolts work that Elliot doesn’t care about. The books, the finances, the general logistics.
Because a small club itself isn’t a gold mine, Elliot and Farid are also grooming their house band in hopes of landing a record deal.
The band, with vocals by the talented but mercurial Maja (Joanna Kulig), has promise it hasn’t yet harnessed. The Eddy spends a good amount of time showing us the band in action and dwelling on multiple ruminations about what it could and should be doing.
Meanwhile, the club also has a problem. It’s not drawing enough of a crowd to pay its bills, which has forced Farid to cut some deals that could have consequences.
Elliot knows just enough about those deals to be concerned, but he’s distracted by a second tense situation.
His daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenberg), has flown over from New York to visit him, and that resurrects an apparent host of issues stemming from Elliot’s split with Julie’s mother. And probably his self-exile from America.
We don’t know the full picture here, only that it seems to have a lot of complications, which we figure out when Julie tells Elliot she’d like to move back in with her mother and have Elliot join them. In New York.
This is one of the junctures at which Elliot doesn’t seem inclined or able to verbalize all the reasons that would not be a good idea. Long-standing rule: You can’t rush the plot in a foreign film. It will show up when it’s ready.
It takes a while even to sort out Elliot’s relationship with Maja, who clearly has some serious internal conversations constantly underway.
The Eddy does not spend all of its eight episodes on anguished and elusive character drama. An event occurs toward the end of the first episode that clearly will determine where everything goes from here.
While that’s all unfolding, The Eddy gives us a lot of music, which is good and even educational. Writer Jack Thorne and director Damien Chazelle often make a point of showing us how music and songs come together in skilled hands.
The show’s plotline, however, rolls out one note at a time. A foreign concept to be sure. But not a bad one.