GO HOME EMILY COOPER?
Emily In Paris has drawn the scorn of French and American expats alike
INYT
Emily embarrasses me, as I don’t see her trying very hard to integrate into French life
n Season 3 of Emily In Paris, Emily Cooper, moonlighting as a server — albeit one wearing designer flats — confuses the words Champagne and champignons, causing a horrible allergic reaction in a customer at Chez Lavaux, a restaurant where her erstwhile French lover Gabriel is head chef.
The scene made Nicole Pritchard, a Paris-based real estate agent, yacht broker and part-time yoga instructor from Virginia, clutch her Hermès scarf in horror. After all, she huffed, Emily (played by Lily Collins) has been living in the French capital for about a year and had a Champagne brand as her client at the fictional luxury marketing firm, Savoir, where she worked. How is it possible, Pritchard asked, that Emily can’t tell the difference between Dom Pérignon and mushrooms?
“Emily embarrasses me, as I don’t see her trying very hard to integrate into French life,” Pritchard, 41, who has lived in Paris for 20 years, said on a recent day, speaking in hushed tones from the lobby of the glamorous Hotel Costes, where she peppered her sentences with carefully enunciated French.
“After all those language classes, she should know the difference between Champagne and champignons,” she added. “It’s two or three syllables. It’s not that hard.”
Since its premiere in late 2020, the popular Netflix series about an American 20-something who moves to Paris for an unexpected job opportunity has spawned a backlash among the French, who complain that it portrays them as nasty, haughty and lazy while projecting Paris as an urban fantasyland, filled with luridly coloured berets, serial philanderers and malevolent servers. When Season 3 was released in late December, Le Monde, the influential French newspaper, published a cri de coeur, sniping: “It is time to consider at least one season of Emily Away from Paris.” Writing last week in the left-leaning French newspaper Libération, David Belliard, deputy mayor of Paris, railed against the show’s “Disneyland Paris, which is confined to the districts of the ultracentre and is inhabited only by the richest people”. The show, he complained, also seemed oblivious to climate change and the scarcity of resources.
But perhaps even more triggered by the series than the French are the real-life Emilys in Paris, American expatriates, who complain that they have spent years perfecting understated elegance and the rolling of their R’s, only to have a brash Chicagoan, in a structured Dolce & Gabbana Zebra-print Jacquard jacket with wings, swoop in and ruin their image.
Emily Hamilton, an actual former Emily in Paris, who previously worked in the culture section of the French embassy in New York, said she gave up watching the show; no one, she said, including Emily or her mean fictional boss Sylvie, played with biting insouciance by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, resembled anyone she had ever met in France.
“Everyone is an exaggeration,” she said. “It all feels completely absurd.”
And among those cringing is even Rebecca Leffler, 40, who has been dubbed “the real Emily In Paris” in the French media and is sometimes a food writer who aspires to be “the Julia Child of kale”. A former New Jersey resident, she worked as a consultant for the series during Season 1, drawing on her two decades of expatriate life in the French capital to help shape Emily’s on-screen Paris life.
Like Emily Cooper, Leffler moved to Paris in her 20s, and worked in a luxury division within Publicis Groupe, a French advertising company. Although she recognised that Emily’s chronic bumbling was a necessary narrative conceit, Leffler said she was nevertheless irked by Season 3 because Emily always seemed to get what she wanted — haute couture, handsome men, business wins — while never seeming to encounter the harsh realities she had, such as French bureaucracy, spiralling rents and gnawing homesickness.
“Emily’s biggest struggle is accidentally cutting her bangs while every hot man she meets falls for her,” Leffler said. “She posts a croissant on Instagram and suddenly has a gazillion followers. She has an entry-level marketing position and can afford expensive designer dresses. I mean, are they kidding?”
Members of the Emily creative team at Netflix, apparently fed up with perceived Emily-bashing, declined multiple interview requests, as did Darren Star, the show’s creator. But Star has previously stressed that Emily In Paris is a glamorous love letter to Paris by a young American woman who had never lived there. Aspirational fantasy — not social anthropology.
Pritchard, a Virginia native who also moved to Paris when she was Emily Cooper’s age, said she had initially cheered the character as she grappled with Parisian dog poop and heartbreak, providing comic relief during Paris’ difficult pandemic lockdowns. But by Season 3, she said her patience had fizzled like bad Champagne after Emily grossly mispronounced bien sur (of course!), flashed her midriff at the office and mistook George Sand, a French romantic writer, as a man.
“My early inspiration for moving to France was the 1954 Billy Wilder film Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn as an awkward American 20-something who transforms into an elegant creature and queen of her own destiny, thanks in part to her French mentors,” Pritchard said. “Sabrina, Emily Cooper is not!”
Although some fashionistas have blasted Emily In Paris for ignoring the famous maxim attributed to Coco Chanel — “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” — the series has won fans among leading designers.
“I don’t know anybody in Paris who dresses like Emily In Paris or any 20-something woman who wears Schiaparelli to get her croissant in the morning,” said Christian Juul Nielsen, creative director of Hervé Léger, who worked nearly a decade in Paris as a designer for Christian Dior. “I wish I did!”
The real-life Emily said, however, that the show’s portrayal of Paris with the grit scrubbed off made them appreciate the real Paris more. Emily also gave them someone to look down on, given that it often seemed as if Frenchwomen could outcook, outcharm and outdress them.
In one sense, at least, Leffler acknowledged she was trying harder to embrace her inner Emily. “I used to want everyone to like me, but the French don’t care if you like them,” she said. “I’m from New Jersey, and now I own it.”