A film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on October 1, 2020.
Darren Star’s TV shows have long
been dismissed as frothy confections interchangeably obsessed with wealth and
sex, but they’ve never been boring. With their perpetual angst and recurring
bed hopping, Beverly Hills, 90210 and
Melrose Place pushed back against the
conservatism of primetime TV. Sex and the
City not only revived HBO and introduced new generations to Manolo Blahnik
shoes, but also brought questions about women’s sexual desire to the
pop-culture forefront. And Younger
has been a surprise hit for TV Land, morphing into a cult favorite that
amusingly tackles questions of ageism and sexism.
None
of the same praise can be leveled toward Star’s newest effort, Emily in Paris. All of the criticisms
that have previously been leveled at Star are actually valid when it comes to
the Netflix series, which is so devoid of narrative tension that it barely
qualifies as entertainment. The show doesn’t seem to have an understanding of
the social media or marketing industries on which it is focused; it mistakes
having a closet full of designer clothes as possessing a personality; and it
relies so much on farcical national stereotypes that it might bring back
traumatizing flashbacks of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte’s trip to
Abu Dhabi in the loathsome Sex and the
City 2. Lily Collins does her
best at playing a Midwestern girl swept up in the glamour of Parisian living,
but the show overall is irredeemably inauthentic and aggravatingly superficial.
From
its very first scene, Emily in Paris
introduces its protagonist, Emily Cooper (Collins), as a striver and a
go-getter. On a cold Chicago morning, Emily runs five miles in 41 minutes, a
pleased smile spreading over her face when her exercise app informs her that
she shaved 18 seconds off her previous personal best. Emily is used to success:
She’s a rising star at the Gilbert Group marketing firm, having made her name
on pharmaceutical and geriatric care products, and she’s in a committed
relationship. But when her pregnant boss (Kate
Walsh) is forced to back out of a one-year work assignment in Paris with a
smaller luxury marketing company, Savoir,
that the Gilbert Group just acquired, the responsibility falls to Emily.
Emily
sees the opportunity as an adventure, a chance to live in a beautiful place and
further her career. There are just a few issues: She doesn’t speak French, and
she doesn’t have any experience marketing the wares in Savoir’s portfolio, like couture fashion or fragrance. But no
matter! Emily is sassy, and she says the words content and engagement a
lot, and she has what the show insists are great ideas. Despite the French
haters, Emily will make it work.
That
broad generalization is about the level of detail that Star puts into
characterizing the professional challenges that Emily encounters in her new
position. The focus of Emily in Paris
more often becomes how mean the French people are to Emily, from her cranky
landlady to her boss, Sylvie (Philippine
Leroy-Beaulieu), who is offended by everything about the American now in
their office. Emily’s experience was in marketing IBS medication, Sylvia
smirks, so how could she understand what the French people want in, say,
lingerie? But expecting any Mad Men-style
scenes explaining how Emily comes up with any of her immediately magical ideas
is a fool’s errand, because Emily in
Paris instead relies over and over again on how Emily’s winning American
pluck helps her overcome any problem.
There
is nothing more to Emily than the fantastic outfits (imagined by Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field) that somehow fit in her
cramped apartment with what is described as only one drawer. She is a social
media savant who somehow accrues thousands of Instagram followers with
eye-rolling captions like Drinking champagne
in Champagne, and who claims to know the American consumer without any data
or statistics to back that up. At least Sex
and the City showed us Carrie writing, shopping, dating, and doing things
in life that informed her work and her point of view. Whether you liked Ms.
Bradshaw or not, you understood her, the tenors of her friendships, and how the
kind of person she imagined herself as sometimes contrasted with how she
actually acted. There is none of that depth in Emily in Paris, which is only interested in its titular character
in terms of what she wears and who she kisses. And even then, it all falls flat
- the love triangles, the workplace rivalries - because there’s no passion to
anything Emily does. Collins is always ready with a broad smile and a peppy
delivery, and she gamely plays along with how often Star writes in
genitalia-related humor (a whole episode centered around the French word coq!),
but Emily never feels like a real person.
Perhaps
all of this would be excusable, or even tolerable, if Emily in Paris treated its main character with any skepticism at
all. To the show’s credit, it briefly engages with this idea when Emily meets a
client who calls her a basic bitch
for decorating her purse with a keychain shaped like the Eiffel Tower. For a
moment, it feels like the show’s incongruous details about Emily - that she
grew up in the Midwest, but doesn’t know how to clean a cast-iron pan; that
she’s been taking months of French classes, but doesn’t know that an aubergine
is an eggplant; that she loves eating Parisian cuisine, but doesn’t know that
the dessert crème brulee has a crisp top of burnt sugar - are hints that she
isn’t as sophisticated as she would like to believe, and that she has in fact
been performing a version of herself. But Emily
in Paris veers away from that more subversive consideration of its
protagonist by giving her an impassioned monologue about how basic bitches are the backbone of the
fashion industry; the designer to whom she is delivering her lecture comes around,
of course, and the two bond over the show Gossip
Girl.
That
setup - Emily correcting the French by proclaiming how great Americans really
are - is one Emily in Paris returns
to often, much like how Star had Carrie quit Paris in the final season of Sex and the City. The tactic is never as
cute as the show thinks it is. And Emily
in Paris is so certain of Emily’s perfection that there is no real impact
when she makes a mistake, like pursuing a friend’s boyfriend, flirting with a
client, or potentially ruining Paris Fashion Week. Problems are wrapped up
within each episode’s 30-minute run time and previous subplots rarely carry
over, which is particularly strange when the show attempts to tackle the #MeToo
movement and the French perspective. Emily becomes the voice of harassed women,
making a grand speech with a number of buzzwords about female strength and the
male gaze. But that perspective comes out nowhere; before that point, we had no
idea what Emily thought about feminism. And the subject never comes up again,
although it would have been thought-provoking for the show to consider whether
Emily’s ideology complicates the work she does with luxury brands that so often
rely on traditional standards of female beauty to sell their products. Emily in Paris drops the conversation
before it gets interesting.
Perhaps
the only way to enjoy Emily in Paris
is to watch it with the knowledge that the characters surrounding Emily are
more intriguing than she is, like Mindy Chen (Ashley Park), the Chinese
heiress-turned-reality-show-contestant-turned-nanny who befriends Emily and
serves as her Samantha, or Emily’s boss, Sylvie, who has achieved so much
success in a field dominated mostly by men, and who is understandably annoyed
by Emily’s prying into her personal life. Leroy-Beaulieu’s performance is
particularly strong, and Sylvie’s cynicism serves as a refreshing contrast to
Emily’s relentless positivity. Also solid is the show’s direction, which is
crisp and effective, although overly reliant on pop songs for scene transitions.
Technically, Emily in Paris is
well-made, but the show’s shortcomings - from its simplistic depiction of
French culture to its paper-thin protagonist - make it more of an irritation
than an indulgence. [Hadadi’s rating: 2 of 5 stars.
Labels:
comedy, drama, fashion, Netflix, Paris, romance
IMDb 73
MetaScore(critics=62, viewers=57)
RottenTomatoesAverages (critics=63, viewers=64)
Link to review
Netflix
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