We continue our spotlight on films featured in NYFF52 with Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, the film that opened Sundance and will no doubt cement Chazelle's reputation as a force to be reckoned with. The film has been likened to a sort of Full Metal Jacket meets The Red Shoes meets Juilliard. It is a tale of musical obsession in which Andrew (Miles Teller) gets accepted to a top music conservatory and is terrorized by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), who believes in beating the talent out of his students.
“The worst two words ever invented are 'good job,'” says Fletcher in the film. This is not cool jazz that Fletcher is teaching. The camera hops from one player's sweating brow to another's shaking fingers as they play until their fingers bleed. Andrew and Fletcher's relationship is sado-masochistic, but never melodramatic. Chazelle looks to be drumming his way into Black Swan territory at one point. Adversity helped create jazz great Charlie Parker, and Chazelle’s experiment asks whether such rejection breeds greatness, and, if so, at what cost?
Whiplash was adapted from an award-winning short into a feature in less than a year. The short was partly the idea of producers Jason Reitman and Jason Blum, who hoped it might break with the confines of young musician movies. Whiplash operates on a completely different plane from Chazelle's debut Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, despite sharing musical themes. Editor Tom Cross aids this, opting here for a rhythmically precise style, using rapid cuts that make watching a band practice as exciting as a car chase.
In a 2014 Guardian article, Henry Barnes says: “It's rare to see a film about music that professes its love for the music and its characters equally. Whiplash shows a director besotted with the precision of jazz (represented by Fletcher) and the raw ecstasy of a talent unleashed (Andrew). The two sides play together, while Chazelle hammers out a new beat for the genre to move to.”
Have a peek at the exclusive trailer below.
Whiplash | Trailer | NYFF52
NYFF Original Description
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at a prestigious New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results. Dubbed “Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard” at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Chazelle’s jazz musical was developed from his short film of the same name, which premiered at Sundance the previous year. The live jazz core that is fused with Justin Hurwitz’s ambient score, the blood-on-the-drum-kit battle between student and teacher, and the dazzling filmmaking will keep your pulse rate elevated from beginning to end. A kinesthetic depiction of performance anxiety—you don’t need to be a musician to feel it—Whiplash also presents us with a moral issue open to debate. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
