I was all ‘Emily in Paris’ on my starry-eyed adventure
The city’s gritty reality is as charming as what we see in the movies, writes David Harding. And we could learn a thing or two from the French about leaving work in the office
Two surprising things happened when I started watching new Netflix show Emily in Paris.
Firstly, despite the reviews, I liked it. Secondly, I realised I was once Emily – just with a tinier Paris apartment, even fewer words of French, and a considerably smaller wardrobe.
I’d left “Fleet Street” and headed off on a starry-eyed adventure to Paris to work for an international news agency. Like Emily, my knowledge of Paris was the cliched one – all bistros, accordions and the Eiffel Tower.
I arrived on my own, utterly clueless about the language and completely ignorant of the city.
So, the cliched Paris, despite all the objections about the programme, was easy to find.
Like Emily, I was corrected on my pronunciation in a boulangerie, someone did pee next to me in the street (well, a bin in a Metro station) and looked at me as if I was the problem while heroically refusing to interrupt their flow, and I did effortlessly end up living above a great restaurant.
And, of course, we are always told the French are work-shy.
I’d left a macho journalist working environment in the UK where I was once told off for leaving the office at 8pm, after starting at 8am, to one where I could only work seven hours a day maximum and one of those had to be a full lunch hour. By law.
On a superficial level this would seem to confirm every cliche about France and work we are told; instead it just proved the offices were harder-working, more focused and far more productive. You just didn’t spend your life there.
Paris, like other major cities – New York is largely Manhattan, not Staten Island, when we watch a film, and London seems to consist of people living in the types of houses I still don’t recognise and haven’t been invited to – sells and portrays itself to a large extent on its cliched image. And some of the cliches are true.
This is hardly Emily’s fault.
It’s just that she will find in a few weeks there’s a lot more to Paris, when the stardust falls from her eyes.
Taxis don’t magically pull up outside a venue with charming drivers, menus in restaurants are boringly predictable, homelessness can be appalling, and I haven’t finished binge-watching, but I bet the programme doesn’t feature a trip through Marcadet-Poissonniers Metro station.
Strangely, the grimy, tiny arrondissements of everyday Paris, where it seems to be constantly raining, turn out to be as charming in real life as anything you see on screen. It’s a great city but the seamier sides confirm it, they make Paris seem more real, less chocolate-box.
Yours,
David Harding
Foreign editor