Oscar Nominee ‘Whiplash’ Has A Freaky Twin Brother

By now you’ve probably heard of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, the writer-director’s second film, which galvanised audiences when it premiered at Sundance last year. It opened in Australia in October to equally ecstatic critical praise; Junkee’s Mel Campbell said “it might just be the best film of 2014”.

The film follows aspiring jazz drummer Andrew as he joins an elite class taught by notoriously demanding instructor Fletcher, who bullies, berates, and beats his students in an attempt to urge them toward glory. As Fletcher, J.K. Simmons garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, while the film itself is up for Best Picture.

It’s less likely that you’ll have heard of a film Chazelle wrote called Grand Piano (2013)—an obscure-ish English-language Spanish thriller starring Elijah Wood—since the film appears to have gone straight to home video in Australia.

It turns out Whiplash and Grand Piano are pretty much exactly the same film. Spoilers follow.

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Here’s the story. A talented but insecure young man known for playing physically demanding music has a spectacular on-stage flameout, after which he takes a hiatus from performing. Later, having accepted an invitation to play at a prestigious, high-stakes concert, this man unexpectedly finds himself in a battle for survival against a bullying opponent who has taken it upon himself to violently push this man to heights of artistic achievement.

Gathering his courage, the young man seizes control of the concert from the onstage conductor, and begins playing without the aid of sheet music or his fellow musicians – astonishing all present with an extravagant display of musical virtuosity. Having thus bested his opponent, the man symbolically receives his reward as his face is suffused with a golden glow.

So, it is Whiplash or Grand Piano?

The answer is both.

Staged Frights

Grand Piano stars Elijah Wood as concert pianist Tom Selznick who—prior to the film beginning—was publicly disgraced when he seized up with stage fright while attempting to play a piece called ‘La Cinquette’ – an audaciously difficult composition by his mentor Patrick Godureaux.

As the film begins, Tom is embarking on a highly feted comeback performance in Chicago, with his glamorous movie-star wife Emma in the audience. His instrument for the evening is a valuable grand piano taken from Godureaux’s own collection.

Once onstage, Tom find threatening messages written into his sheet material and learns that a laser-targeted rifle is tracking him. The mysterious gunman, named Clem (played by John Cusack), contrives to get Tom an earpiece, and the two begin a dialogue in which Tom is instructed to play the concert absolutely note-perfect or else he or his wife will be shot.

It’s a totally ludicrous set-up, but Chazelle is fully aware of this, and he manages to spin it out into a punchy, pulpy script that never looks down its nose at its own silliness. The director Eugenio Mira gives the film an operatic Brian De Palma-cum-Dario-Argento intensity that never loses focus; the film is sleek and confident all the way through, and, at a brisk 90 minutes, never tries to outlast its own premise.

Mira is an appealingly confident visual stylist, and—although a couple of bodies do hit the floor (it is a thriller, after all)—he keeps the film mostly bloodless, allowing the foreboding set design to do the talking.

As it turns out, Clem’s fiendish plot is even more ridiculous than you’d expect. He doesn’t just want Selznick to play a great concert, he wants him to try ‘La Cinquette’ again and play it perfectly, because (bear with me, here) Godureaux’s piano is actually a specially designed mechanism, and once the piece is played note-for-note it will release a key which—it just so happens—will open a safe-deposit box where the late composer’s famously missing fortune is stored.

Tom winds up interrupting the scheduled program to whip through a rendition of ‘La Cinquette’ with only a few hand-scrawled instructions to aid him. He plays the piece perfectly, with the deliberate exception of the last note, thus overcoming his performance anxiety and foiling Clem’s plan. One or two plot machinations later and the two are grappling over a sniper rifle among the light fixtures above the stage, whereupon they both topple over: Clem, smashing into the piano and dying; Selznick, landing in relative safety (although he does ‘break a leg’).

The Golden Key

Although it was written prior to Whiplash, Grand Piano is essentially a Grand Guignol re-staging of that film’s climactic concert performance – give or take a couple of dead bodies.

Like Tom, Whiplash’s hero Andrew Neiman (played by Miles Teller) suffers a devastating setback when he publically flames out during a concert—although in Whiplash, to be fair, it’s because he’s just been in a car accident—after which he takes an extended sabbatical, quitting school and giving up on his dream of becoming the next Buddy Rich.

When his now ex-teacher Fletcher invites him to perform at a jazz festival, Andrew cautiously agrees. Once onstage, Fletcher reveals that he has lured Andrew into a trap designed to ruin him in front of a career-making audience. The band launches into an unknown tune for which Andrew has no sheet music – he tries to muddle through, but to no avail.

Desperate to prove himself, Andrew—just like Tom—seizes control of the concert, launching into the song ‘Caravan’ even before Fletcher has finished addressing the audience. The band duly joins in and together they nail the tune, which is notorious for its difficult tempo. But instead of finishing as normal, Andrew launches into an absolutely epic, extemporaneous drum solo; astonishing the audience and even drawing Fletcher back on side.

Chazelle finishes the film on the song’s climax, as the band chimes in for Caravan’s final notes and the stage lights flare up, suffusing Andrew’s exhausted figure with a golden halo.

Meanwhile, in Grand Piano, Tom–having defeated the gunman–hangs back awhile as the police wind up proceedings at the concert hall. The ruined piano has been bundled into a van, and Tom hauls himself up inside and attacks the keys, replaying the final portion of ‘La Cinquette’ perfectly, including the final note – although the instrument itself no longer makes much noise. As he turns away, the mechanism inside the piano does its business, and a key drops onto the floor of the van. In the final shot, Tom turns back as his face is lit up by the golden glow from below.

An Abstracted Form Of Physical Combat

Chazelle himself was in a “highly competitive” jazz band in high school, and it’s amusing to think that the story for Whiplash is so personal to him that he pretty much wrote it two separate times before he finally made it. Yet despite the fact that both films are about highly accomplished musicians and feature a lot of live music, they seem pretty disinterested in the artistry of music itself.

For all the orchestral tunes to be heard within, Grand Piano seems to care nothing for the classical corpus – it even climaxes with a jazz song, as Tom coaxes his wife into belting out a standard from her balcony seat while he searches for a way to defeat Clem.

Writing about Whiplash for The New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody (an evident jazz fiend) bemoans the film’s absence of feeling for the art form its hero reveres: “The movie’s very idea of jazz is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature”. As Brody points out, Andrew doesn’t play, study, or watch much jazz at all. In fact, “there’s nothing in the film to indicate that Andrew has any originality in his music” – surely a desirable feature in a prospective jazz great.

Amusingly, this is the same sort of charge that that Clem levels at Tom during Grand Piano, calling him a “mediocre artist” and a “petty thief” who makes a living “playing stuff that other people write”. Which suggests, all in all, that Chazelle may be a little more self-conscious about this stuff than Brody’s stance implies.

As other critics haven’t hesitated to point out, Whiplash may as well be a sports film instead of a musical. Like Grand Piano, it treats musicianship as something more like a highly abstracted form of physical combat than an artistic expression. Tom and Andrew both pit themselves against their instruments as a means for personal therapy; working out their self-doubts and anxieties through sheer physical exertion. Their human opponents, Clem and Fletcher, are ultimately mere collaborators in the goal of focusing their attention on their own catharsis.

At the climax of Whiplash it’s impossible to tell whether the solo Andrew is playing is really any good. What’s most important is the physical stamina and dexterity he is exerting upon it. Which brings us back to Tom, pounding out ‘La Cinquette’ on a broken piano that can do nothing but sag and clack. In the end, it’s all just noise.

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James Robert Douglas is a freelance writer and critic in Melbourne. His work has been found in The Big Issue, Meanland, Screen Machine, and the Meanjin blog. He tweets from @jamesrobdouglas