I was lucky enough to visit Paris five years ago this month (thank Brothatime!!) and really have no idea what I was expecting, but I immediately fell in love with all of it: the endless blocks of limestone architecture, the simplicity of a jambon buerre on every corner, the thousand year-old cathedrals and even the waiters who wouldn't let me attempt to order en Francais. I had not too many preconceived notions, I ate up all the tourist traps and drank wine by the liter, and I long for the day I can visit again.
But apparently, Hollywood has always had a problem conveying the true Paris, as seen most recently in Netflix' Emily in Paris:
Set a century after Fitzgerald took up residence in the city of lights, Sex and the City creator Darren Star’s new series is the latest work to deploy the ‘American in Paris’ trope which, no matter how many attempts they make, screenwriters just can’t seem to nail. It centres around a young US marketing consultant sent to live in Paris after her firm acquires a French agency. What ensues is a parade of every Hollywood cliché about life in the French capital imaginable, including rude chain-smoking colleagues and romance on every corner. Watching the series’ 10 episodes I was left with the question: how is Hollywood still getting Paris so wrong?
This could be a chance for the show to satirise the prettified American view of Paris, but really it just plays into it; like his heroine, Starr gives us a city that is a total fantasy world. Emily becomes an influencer, attends lavish champagne-soaked parties, and meets hunky Parisian men at every turn. “For the most part, American directors paint their depictions of Paris and its culture through either nostalgic or rose-coloured glasses [...]” says Dr Alice Craven, Professor in Film Studies at The American University of Paris. “Audiences, particularly American ones, want to relish the beauty of the city of lights and therefore welcome the misty tints given to the city by these directors.” Again and again, on-screen depictions of Paris, from 1995 Meg Ryan vehicle French Kiss to the climax of Sex and the City, which saw Carrie Bradshaw find her fairytale ending there with Mr Big, have used it as a twinkling backdrop for romantic fantasies.
How did our view of Paris happen? Aha:
It arguably stems from the interwar period when young writers, artists and philosophers of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ – a term coined by novelist Gertrude Stein – flocked to Paris. In the 1920s bohemian titans like Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Man Ray, TS Eliot and Jean Rhys formed a creative coterie – partying together at jazz clubs, exchanging ideas, and generally living the expat dream we now associate with Paris.
In the end, Gil decides to move to Paris but remain in the present. Something that he, as a millionaire scriptwriter, can certainly afford to do, but the average writer cannot these days, easily at least. You see, there was a reason that Hemingway could afford to rent an apartment and an office space while sipping endless bottles of wine and slurping oysters in Saint Germain: after World War One, the Franc was massively devalued, down to 25 to the dollar, so an American could live off a meagre salary and treat Paris like a beautiful playground. This, dear reader, is no longer the case.
Personally I don't know how many movies set in Paris I've seen - maybe only Ratatouille? - but I do know that in every novel I've read that's set in Paris, it's the opposite of what we're seeing in the movies. Granted they've all been set in the 19th century, but it's always brutal: desperate families in slums, fighting each other for scraps of stale bread, pulling nails out of their walls to sell for rotgut booze to later fuel the brutal beatings of wives in front of their equally poor and shitfaced neighbors. Hardly the stuff of Instagram.
Meanwhile, enjoy my 2015 trip to Paris HERE! :)
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