the times | Tuesday October 13 2020 1GT 9
times
I
trust you’ve been binge-watching
Netflix’s cringe-hit, Emily in Paris?
Emily, played by Lily Collins (31,
looks 13), is the latest heroine from
the Sex and the City creator Darren
Star: a perky ingenue sent from the
good old US of A to patronise
Parisians about Instagram while not
even parler-ing Franglais.
J’adore Emily for what it is: the
epitome of so-bad-it’s-good Covid TV.
The magic moments come more often
than she does: take the scene in which
she receives oral sex from a semiotics
professor picked up at the Café de
Flore while sporting an Eiffel Tower
bra. Critics — and they are legion —
complain that the show is based on
cliché, which is obviously the point.
Beret-sporting Emily is labelled a
plouc (hick) and ringarde (tacky), while
her Paris is the candy-coloured
theme park of Gene Kelly’s
An American in Paris rather
than the grey reality.
As for the complaint that
Star’s Parisians have been
stereotyped as rude, chic,
bitchy, sex-obsessed
amateur philosophers
who are obsessed
with bureaucracy,
relaxed about office
hours, smoke rather
than eat, shag their
bosses, deposit dog
shit in the street, and
curl their lips at
foreigners — what
of it? Anyone who
has spent any time in
Paris, and I have for work
and pleasure, will simply
sigh: “Plus ça change.”
Parisian women, inLily Collins in
Emily in Parisparticular, bear a striking resemblance
to Emily’s boss, Sylvie, whose sensual
elegance is winningly juxtaposed with
Emily’s clodhopping cartoonishness.
Sylvie smokes constantly, stalks about
in muted hues, humps clients against
trees, and is glacially confident.
In this respect she is entirely like
the Parisian executives I have
worked with who pride themselves
on their impeccably low-key
sophistication, finding everybody else
lumberingly obvious.
I have had French birds blot away
my (de trop) lip colour, inform me
I am sporting too much scent, and —
as Emily endures — clamouring to
retie my scarf; the last an assistant at
a grand French fashion house who
greeted my dog-bow method with the
cry: “Please, no!” Similarly, no French
woman ever carries a Hermès
Kelly or Birkin, rather the more
nonchalant Plume.
As for their eating habits, a
distinct trompe l’oeil applies.
I recall one queen bee
insouciantly ordering steak
tartare, chips, a glass of
wine and dessert
for dinner at the
Ritz, then consuming the
meat, two chips and a
spoonful of said pudding.
Meanwhile, a fellow
British journalist literally
had to be carried out of
the room drunk.
Taken to lunch by
another fashion house,
I witnessed eight soigné
women sharing one cream
cake. A friend working in
Paris while heavily
pregnant was shouted atRude, chic, bitchy amateur
philosophers — mais oui
Hannah Betts
has been claimed as one of the more
egregious clichés in a show entirely
made up of egregious cliché, I wonder
whether it goes far enough.
When I lived in Paris, a
fortysomething friend stayed over at
another friend’s flat after a party and
somehow ended up in bed with her
20-year-old. The mother walked in
as matters were reaching a climax.
Instead of throwing my friend into the
street, the mother waited for a while
and then knocked discreetly on the
door and asked if they fancied a cup
of tea after their exertions.
Emily in Paris has provoked such
loathing among the French that the
phrase “le hate watching” has entered
the language. The show’s premise —
Chicago ingenue Learns about Life in
Gay Paree — has practically provoked
a diplomatic incident online, with
bloggers competing over their most-
despised moments.
Emily’s utter indifference to “the
language of Molière” scores highly, as
does her preference for well-done
steak and her ridiculous “chambre de
bonne” apartment, a huge loft with a
million-euro view. (The show’s creator,
the Sex and the City writer Darren
Star, pulled off a similar real-estate
shocker when Carrie Bradshaw could
apparently afford an Upper East Side
brownstone on the profits of writing
a paragraph a week.)
Yet the thing Emily in Paris really
gets wrong is the sex. Not that there’s
too much, but too little, and, moreover,
no one thinks it’s such a big deal.
I noted an example of how
important sex remains in Parisian
culture when I was last there in June.
While club owners fulminated against
strict lockdown rules, partouze venues
— basically swingers’ clubs — were
able to remain open due to a loophole
that classifies them as sports centres.
My friend Delphine recently
confessed to sleeping with three men
in 24 hours, but she wasn’t inclined
to judge herself. If a difference still
exists between the French and the
Anglo-Saxons, I think it’s not that all
French women are thin and elegant,
skipping off for a daily cinq à sept
with their lovers, but that they don’t
agonise about sexual pleasure. As the
sex blogger Camille Beaufils puts it:
“I love my life of adventure, full of
lovers and surprises.”
That’s not to say that issues of
sexual harassment aren’t taken
seriously — the Balancetonporc
movement, the French equivalent of
Me Too, has made a huge difference to
women who have endured abuse and
assault, but (perhaps) without some of
Me Too’s more puritanical implications.
Sex isn’t something nasty that men
do to women, it’s a delight to be
equally savoured between consenting
adults. Perhaps that’s why so many
French women feel insulted by the
portrayal of the men in Emily as
unregenerate gropers; it implies that
they are somehow more passive or
indulgent of exploitation.
What is also lacking in the show is
a dose of existential anguish. True
sexual liberation also requires some
Gallic gloom. Writers such as Michel
Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder
supply plenty of hand-wringing about
how sex has become yet another
commercial diversion.
Emily in Paris entirely fails to get to
grips with either the sparkle or the
darkness of how French women see
sex, but then what else could one
expect of such a determinedly
superficial portrait of the City of Light?by her boss for not being aware of the
calories in a banana. As one fashion-
week regular notes: “The brands put
out minuscule pastries — the Frogs
still eat half.”
As for the chaps, assuming they are
all attempting to get into your culottes
is never a bad rule of thumb, and I say
this as a woman once propositioned by
a gay man in the lift at Le Bristol. “But
aren’t you homosexual?” I inquired.
He merely shrugged.
My boyfriend lived in France for
almost a decade, and no eyebrows
were raised when he began sleeping
with a married colleague, even when
her husband discovered his toothbrush
and razor. Other girlfriends berated
him for their relationship’s lack of
drama, where their British equivalents
might condemn an excess.
Moreover, it is true — Parisians
rightly resent it if you don’t speak the
language, if only so they can curtly
address you in English when you do
make the attempt. Witness the taxi
driver who pleaded with me to desist,
lest he crash the cab with mirth.APAre snobby,
smoking,
skinny
Parisians
really a cliché?
Emily in Paris, the new Netflix show,
has been slammed for its stereotypes.
Two writers disagree with that verdict
Rit
I
n episode eight of Netflix’s series
Emily in Paris the American
heroine enjoys a night of passion
that leaves her with a huge hickey
and explaining to do. Since she has
only three words of French, she has
mistaken “college” for “university” and
slept with her hostess’s 17-year-old son.
However, Madame’s concern is not
that Emily has, albeit inadvertently,
had sex with a minor, but whether her
boy’s technique did the family honour
proud. While this laissez-aller attitudeThere’s too
little sex here,
not too much
Lisa Hilton