With Paris sufficiently conquered, Emily, that icon of US hegemony and soft power, is now in Rome. I picture an American general pushing an Emily doll across a map of Europe with one of those little sticks. Emily is, lest we forget, a key strategic asset of the deep state.
Paris is gone now, of course. It’s nothing to us. Ashes in our mouth. The opening credits for Emily in Paris (Netflix) literally erase the word “Paris” and replace it with “Rome”, which feels a bit cold but should be a lesson to us all when it comes to neglecting our relationship with the United States.
Look, they’ve probably nuked it, which is fair enough given how rude the Parisians have been to our precious angel Emily (Lily Collins, daughter of the chirpy crooner Phil) for not learning French and wandering their city snaffling croissants like a fashion-forward Monchhichi.
She is forever opening doors and windows with wonder, and she does this once more at the outset of season five. She gazes from her new apartment across the eternal city of Rome, which she will soon bend to her iron will like fusilli. She has a big smile and big eyes and Groucho Marx eyebrows and a helmet-like bob that reminds me of Darth Vader. Somewhere we can hear someone singing a hymn in terror.
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Emily is quickly joined by an Italian hunk who embraces her. He has a moustache and dungarees and white gloves and a little red hat. “It’s-a-me, Mario,” he says, sexily.
Mario wants Emily to return to bed before he goes out to work in the Mushroom Kingdom and she goes out to her job as a representative of American innocence abroad.
It is, it has to be said, difficult for us to see Emily in a sexual light, and I assume if they were to go to bed they’d just lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling with their huge glowing eyes. I mean, today she’s dressed like a little boy from a British boarding school, in a stripy blazer and shorts. She is a fashion maverick.
Emily takes a bus to work, which is strange and exotic for an American, who like their transportation to evoke burning oil and charred forests. She loses a scarf on the bus, but it’s returned by a concerned Italian (concerned, no doubt, that if anything happens to Emily the US state department will bomb the place).
She’s in Rome because her boss, Sylvie, is opening a Roman office for her marketing firm, Agence Grateau. This means all of the staff have moved there and are all doing what they do best: having sexual relationships with their clients.
Nothing truly bothers Emily, and this is the source of her perverse and uncanny power
It goes without saying that Agence Grateau has no HR department. If it did have one, the “HR” would definitely stand for “happy riding”. Even Emily’s new lover, Mario, is the son of a fashion mogul they wish to woo – Bowser, I think her name is, or possibly Donkey Kong.
There is some bigotry on display in Emily in Paris against Americans like Emily, who can’t learn a foreign language because of their brain shape and so force everyone to have business meetings in English.
And in the first episode people keep telling Emily that her lover has never dated an American before, as though an American-Italian union is a strange and unnatural oddity that might have unforeseen consequences. I picture the Dolmio family with their flapping felt faces. (I expect there’ll soon be a humanistic speech from Emily along the lines of, “Am I not like you? If you prick me does a special-forces helicopter not come in and wipe out your village?”)
In fairness, though, Emily is largely above it all. She has been expanding her powers since season one. In the first episode of the new series Sylvie is about to light a cigarette in her office when Emily stops her. An American stopping a French person from smoking in Italy? I start sobbing like a baby (possibly an Italian baby who’s had his baby cigarettes taken). The Old World is over. The postwar consensus has collapsed. The future is to the east.
Minnie Driver knows what’s what. The diminutive motorist is playing an old friend of Sylvie’s, the rich English wife of an Italian aristocrat. She fits right in with the Italians. She has the slogan “Italia is love” on a sort of lanyard over a ballgown, and she ostentatiously drinks Peroni and gives a performance akin to a fine Italian prosciutto.
Indeed, sometimes I suspect she’s replaced by her stunt double, some delicious ham in a wig, but I can’t blame her for taking this gig. She probably got an American passport, a bucket of silver dollars and a presidential pardon out of the deal.
[ ‘Badly done, Emma!’ Jane Austen needed only a picnic to torment her readersOpens in new window ]
As always in Emily in [insert conquered European city of your choice here], the dramatic journey that each episode most closely resembles is that of a screensaver or a series of Instagram posts or possibly a baby’s dream. Nothing bad ever happens or ever will happen to Emily in Rome. And if anything even remotely difficult occurs, Emily will bounce back before the episode is over with her big white smile and her huge goggling eyes and her glossy black cowl of hair and her outfit like a precocious child’s drawing.
Nothing truly bothers Emily, and this is the source of her perverse and uncanny power. She will no doubt move on from Rome eventually. My advice to you is that when she arrives at the walls of your city, just submit. Resistance is futile.
I’m already preparing for Emily in Dublin – Emily wearing an asexually sexy deconstructed leprechaun outfit while guzzling Guinness from a champagne flute and speaking the occasional word of Irish as though choking on boxty.
The premise of the postapocalyptic drama Fallout (Prime Video) reminds me a little of the preapocalyptic drama Emily in Paris, in that at its core is a Pollyannaish ingenue who enrages locals with her naivety about life in the irradiated badlands. It should be called Emily in the Irradiated Badlands.
In Emily in the Irradiated Badlands/Fallout, our bunker-born heroine (Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets) scours the postnuclear wastes in search of her missing father (played by the square-jawed Kyle MacLachlan), encountering all sorts of mutants and monsters and murderous robots along the way. It’s good, cartoony fun thanks to the charismatic Purnell and to the anti-heroic, noseless zombie played by the excellent Walton Goggins.
In fairness, the world of Fallout is also significantly more realistic than any of the magical fantasy worlds depicted in Emily in Paris or Emily in Rome. Fallout is based on a computer game. Emily in Paris, as we’ve already established, is based on American foreign policy.
