In the third season of ‘Emily in Paris’, Emily Cooperworking a second job as a waitress, confuses the words “champagne” and “mushrooms”, causing a terrible allergic reaction in a customer at Chez Lavaux, the restaurant where her French love interest, Gabriel, is a chef.
The scene caused Nicole Pritchard, a Paris-based real estate agent from Virginia, to tug at her Hermès scarf in horror. After all, she commented in exasperation, Emily (played by Lily Collins) has been living in the French capital for a year and had a brand of champagne as a client at the marketing firm where she worked. How can Emily not be able to tell the difference between Dom Pérignon and mushrooms?
“Emily embarrasses me, because I don’t see her trying very hard to integrate into French life,” said Pritchard, 41, who has lived in Paris for 20 years.
Since its premiere at the end of 2020, the popular Netflix series about a young woman from the US, who moves to Paris for a job, has generated a negative reaction among the French, who complain that portrays them as despicable, arrogant and lazywhile casting Paris as an urban fantasyland filled with garishly colored berets, inveterate womanizers, and malevolent waiters.
When the third season premiered at the end of December, Le Monde, the influential French newspaper, declared, “it is time to consider at least one season of Emily’s Far From Paris.” But perhaps even more upset are American expats, who complain that they’ve spent years perfecting subtle elegance and double-R pronunciation only to have their image ruined.
Rebecca Leffler, 40, has been called “the real ‘Emily in Paris’” in the French media and aspires to be “the Julia Child of kale”. Leffler, a former New Jersey resident, served as a consultant for the series during the first season, drawing on her two decades of life as an expat in the French capital. Just like Emily Cooper Leffler moved to Paris in her early twenties and worked at an advertising firm.
While acknowledging that Emily’s clumsiness was a necessary narrative concept, Leffler said she was still irritated by Season 3 because Emily always seemed to get what she wanted without ever running into harsh realities, like French bureaucracy, rents for clouds or nostalgia for his country.
Members of Netflix’s “Emily” creative team turned down multiple interview requests, as did series creator Darren Star. However, Star has previously emphasized that “Emily in Paris” is aspirational fantasy—not social anthropology.
Pritchard stated that he had initially cheered for the character while dealing with Parisian dog feces and heartbreak, offering comedic moments during the harsh pandemic lockdowns in Paris.
However, by the third series, he explained that his patience had run out when Emily mispronounced ‘bien sûr’ (‘of course!’) and flashed her midriff in the office.
Pritchard claimed that his weekly pilgrimage to the Café de Flore, where Simone de Beauvoir and Picasso once smoked and preached, had been ruined by the dozens of outrageous fans from ‘Emily in Paris’ who now fill the cafe taking selfies.
Pamela Druckerman, 52, a Miami writer who lives in Paris, said the series treated Paris as “a two-dimensional caricature” in which Emily can zip from Montmartre to the Left Bank “without ever having to take the subway.” or run into homeless people.”
Emily held an uncomfortable mirror of everything Druckerman had fought not to be. “We tried so hard not to be the nasty American, and here Emily in her terrible accent and her loud clothes, yelling at the French in English and hoping they would understand,” she noted.
“Being an American expat in Paris is about trying to be vaguely French or invisibly American, and Emily is the opposite of that.”
By: DAN BILEFSKY
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6552966, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-31 22:00:08
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