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If there’s one thing I hate, it’s jokes at the expense of the French. Especially if they imply Parisians are in any way frosty or rude. They just aren’t; I mean, you only have to look at how much they love their poodles. With their fluffy coats, cold noses, oddly shaved legs and lingering smell of raw meat, the French really are fond of dogs.
We are intimidated by French women because they’re so chic. And thin. They’re chic because they’re thin. They’re thin because they don’t eat because they’re worried their husbands are sleeping with someone else, which they all are.
I was thinking about this as I watched Emily in Paris, the controversial new Netflix series from Darren Star, who adapted Candace Bushnell’s newspaper columns into the iconic Sex and the City. Perhaps you’ve read about it? French people are very angry. Also, lots of them don’t like this new TV series. What’s their problem with it? Well, like the beginning of this column, the programme seems suspiciously anti-French. Emily (Lily Collins) is a cheerful American expert in social media, who gets a job in Paris where everyone is horrible. The Parisians are sneery and unwelcoming, chilly and snobbish. But back to the programme.
Sorry, that was cheap. Jokes like that are cheap, and of course French viewers are offended. This is not to say there isn’t a true (or trueish) central premise: to the visitor, some cities are simply friendlier than others. Paris and Vienna do not give the immediate impression of warmth that you’d find in Naples or Swansea. (Neither does London, and I say that as a patriotic citizen of it! A patriotic, masked citizen who won’t give you the time of day.)
Nevertheless, it’s one thing to reflect the chilly bustle of a certain kind of city, another to depict a wide range of actual colleagues in an actual Parisian workplace as uniformly foul. It seems harsh, even when the workplace is a marketing company for expensive cosmetics, where you could reasonably expect people to be fouler than usual. Somebody would have a trace of warmth or welcome about them, surely?
Meanwhile, viewers this side of the Channel have complained about other misrepresentations. They say Emily has too many expensive clothes, the sun shines too often and there’s too much cartoonish cliché. Practically every shot contains a chain-smoking fashionista, a grumpy boulangère cycling past the Eiffel Tower or a pale Frenchman slicing a rare fillet steak with his cheekbones.
Also, despite the panto rudeness of her colleagues, Emily has a better first visit to Paris than anyone who actually exists has ever had. It’s all tiny coffees and sumptuous bouillabaisses in golden brasseries on shiny days. Everyone in the real world, literally without exception, spends their first visit to Paris paying a fortune for a stringy steak under the smeared plastic awning of an unheated café, then having a terrible row in a flea market.
But I’m fine with that kind of faking. Who wants reality, for crying out loud? Take a look around you! That’s reality! You want more of it?
The show’s big sister, Sex and the City, put a similarly sheeny gloss on the visuals. Sun was always shining on the appealing galleries and restaurants of a shimmery-clean New York, and the characters were always in couture. This made it an appealing world to join.
Emily/Lily Collins does not have the charm and complexity of Carrie Bradshaw/Sarah Jessica Parker. She has less of the performer’s X-factor, and is much more straightforwardly pretty – thus, inevitably, less relatable. A generation of women fell in love with SJP because her beauty was as much a product of hard work as luck. God gave her a statement nose, frizzy hair, creative vision and discipline. We knew in our hearts that we could look as good as this dazzling creature, if we could only be bothered.
So we related to Carrie’s look, her messy romantic life and the witty, troubled, complex questions she asked as she sprawled at her keyboard in fabulous underwear. (And just in case we didn’t relate, we were offered three best friends – a range of womanhood, as it were – where Lily Collins is being asked to carry the show completely alone.)
But the 21st-century vision of male-female relations in Emily in Paris is not complex at all. Emily is so vocal about sexism, creepy groping and the seamier male gaze that the viewer sees no hint of her own physical desires. It becomes impossible to root for her to get off with anyone, as the men come across as all somehow disgusting. By the time Emily is switching on her vibrator (surely a deliberate echo of Sex and the City’s infamous “rabbit scene” of 1998), one feels horrible for looking, as if the programme itself is just another leering chauvinist.
Carrie Bradshaw and friends were also groped, insulted and revolted as they made their way around the city, but it clashed with their own lust and sexual power. To me, that confusing mix is a truer reflection of the female experience. Ultimately, I suspect that making the central character a social media expert – a poster of one-line tweets and Insta hashtags, rather than a long-form columnist – stands for a massive simplification of the entire Sex and the City experiment.
Nevertheless, I will watch Emily in Paris again. I quite like it! And I like it for all the things that others criticise. Everything is beautiful and silly, and the sun shines.
The latest Netflix controversy is sunny, silly and pokes fun at the French. Where do you stand?
This week, Victoria Coren Mitchell has been watching Emily in Paris