If Emily’s offensive, it’s lucky these are in the past
ONE VIEWER’S national stereotype is another viewer’s comic turn.
Witness the latest salvo fired in the culture wars last week at the unlikely Emily In Paris series on Netflix. Viewed by almost 60 million households around the world it centres on Emily, a young carefree American marketing executive working in the French capital.
Most cliches, from berets baguettes, get a full airing.
But it’s not the French who are outraged (although they are having their say about “cliches”).
It’s the Ukrainian Minister of Culture who objects to Emily’s Ukrainian friend Petra, who in one episode dashes out of a store without paying.
Emily tells her, “You know what happened to Jean Valjean when he stole the baguette?”
It’s not clear if Petra, whose greatest crime is to have the dress sense of Dame Edna, picks up on the reference Les Miserables, but the Ukrainian minister Olek Tkachenko did, with a letter of complaint to Netflix, saying: “Is this how Ukrainians will be seen abroad? Who steal, want to get everything
to for free, be afraid of deportation? This should not be so.”
The Emily In Paris writer, when asked about cliches, says he is “not sorry for looking at Paris through a glamorous lens”. It is, after all, a light-hearted drama.
But in film and TV twas ever thus. Whether you want to raise a hue and cry about it is one thing, but stereotypical or stock characters have been with us since silent movies, and Victorian melodrama.
Granted, many do not bear too much close examination, looking back. For example, who would now cast the illustrious Alec Guinness in his famous role as the eccentric philosophising Indian character Dr Godbole in double Oscarwinning A Passage To India (or indeed Ben Kingsley as Gandhi)?
But even last week we hear that non-jewish Dame Helen Mirren will play Israeli leader Golda Meir in a Hollywood film.
Fellow dame, Corrie’s Mauren Lipman who is Jewish, attacked the casting, saying the politician should be played by a Jewish actress. She