Snobs may complain but many of us love frothy fun of Emily in Paris

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There are so many snobs who love to look down their noses at Emily in Paris, as if it is simply beneath them to deign spending time watching a frothy light romantic comedy series. But scratch the surface and you’ll find there’s way more people who love the hit Netflix series about a young American woman, played by Phil Collins’s daughter Lily Collins, who moves to the City of Lights to join a French ad agency.

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I asked on Facebook if people were Emily lovers or haters and it was almost only lovers who responded.

Wrote Mambo Italiano author Steve Galluccio: “I love Emily In Paris. It does what it does well. Escapism which is what TV used to be.”

Said Quebec film producer Barbara Shrier: “Totally Team Emily … (well … Team Gabriel if you must know). I love how with each season the amount of spoken French has increased and the wardrobe dept has been given carte blanche! My total and unabashed guilty pleasure.”

Added Gazette columnist Toula Drimonis: “I love it! It’s ridiculously fun! Bruno as Luc is my absolute favourite character.”

Bruno is actor Bruno Gouery, who plays Luc, one of Emily’s colleagues at the ad/marketing agency, and Gouery is in town this week with his co-star Samuel Arnold, who plays another colleague, Julien. They’re here to talk up the fourth season of Emily in Paris, which recently debuted on Netflix. The second half of the season is due to drop on the streaming service Sept. 12.

Gouery, who was also in the fab series The White Lotus, and Arnold are well aware that many have criticized the show for playing up the most clichéd images of Paris and French culture. But these two French actors have no issue with fact Emily in Paris is something of a tourist brochure for the French capital.

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“For sure it’s built around clichés,” said Gouery, who was sitting with Arnold in the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel on Tuesday morning. “I have trouble with people criticizing the show because of that. Every artist who proposes a vision of a city, they can never present it in its entirety. Emily in Paris is the vision of (series creator) Darren Star. It’s like saying (Italian filmmaker Federico) Fellini defined Rome. He didn’t. He gave an image of Rome. Darren Star gives an image of Paris. It’s like the animated film Ratatouille. It gives one image of Paris, but it’s not Paris. As a Frenchman and a Parisian, I’m very proud of the way he presents my city. He shows the beautiful side of Paris and I’ve met literally hundreds of people who tell me they came to Paris because of the series. I think we should thank Darren Star.”

Arnold seconds that emotion.

“We can’t define a city in a 30-minute episode of a TV series,” said Arnold, who moved to Los Angeles in June to take advantage of the buzz around the series and try to get his career going in the U.S. “Darren Star made a series called Sex and the City and I arrived in New York City and very quickly realized there’s a lot more to New York than Sex and the City. Even in a documentary, you can’t capture 100 per cent of a city.”

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The touristy travelogue side of Emily in Paris is quite enjoyable. It often showcases iconic aspects of Paris — from the Eiffel Tower to hopping French bistros — and the other cool element is the fact there’s so much French spoken in the series. With the arrival of Netflix and the other streaming services, we English North Americans have become much more used to watching shows in languages other than English and that’s one reason no one objects to so much of Emily being in the language of Truffaut. The fourth season has more French dialogue than ever before.

“It’s logical that the French characters speak French among themselves,” Gouery said.

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Added Arnold: “There was a bit of French here and there in Season One, then in Season Two there were a few conversations and now in Season Four, the season could actually be categorized as bilingual. It’s like a homage to the French language. Emily comes to Paris and she’s asked to speak French. Well that’s what happened to the series too. It came to Paris and it had to start speaking French.”

At one point, Gouery’s character, Luc, says to Emily that French is the language of diplomacy and that it’s a language full of subtlety.

“I find there’s a real severity from the French media towards Emily in Paris,” Gouery said. “But I think my character really highlights a lot of things about French culture. I talk about Balzac, about the films of François Truffaut.”

The premise of the show is all about a somewhat naive young woman lost in translation in Paris and much of the comedy comes from Emily not understanding the subtleties of the language of the people around her. Which begs the question: Here we are in Season Four and Emily, kind of like most of the players on the Montreal Canadiens, seems unable to learn more than three words of French even though she’s living in a French city.

“We have to be a little indulgent with Emily,” Arnold said. “For the public, they’ve been watching Emily in Paris for four seasons, but in the series Emily has only been in Paris for three or four months. She hasn’t even been there for a year!”

bkelly@postmedia.com

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