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Emily in Paris season 4 part 1 review: The trailer of the fourth instalment of Darren Star’s show hinted at its apparent obsession with the theme of Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) torn between her two lovers – friendly neighbour-chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and athletic British charmer Alfie (Lucien Laviscount). What a good problem to have! But once the show starts unfurling, we realise how like every season, this one also proves Emily in Paris is not a surface skimmer. It’s more about her romance with the city, than the teenage dilemma of picking her next boyfriend.
(Also Read – Emily in Paris Season 4 Parts 1 & 2: Release date, cast and everything we know so far)
Love-hate relationship with Paris
At a subconscious level, Emily’s conflict is like that of Devi in another Netflix show, Never Have I Ever. One guy represents home, while the other represents fitting in. Her dilemma is laced with go-getter greed – she wants to achieve everything that she set out for in her Paris sojourn. She wants to fiercely guard her American identity, but also embrace the French culture. So her conflict isn’t really between two guys, but between the convenient idea of having it all and the gnawing beast that is FOMO. Yet she’s fully aware of the fact that for her to reach a new country, she needs to fly out of the one she’s in.
Clearly, Emily’s conundrum is more internal than external. Another one is her relationship with the grey – she tries her best to embrace the zone between black and white – while wearing black and white stripes from neck to toe, mind you. She wants to go with the flow, not overthink it, as the French do. But her mind is decidedly American – it craves for clarity, consistency, and order. She sincerely tries to go down the French promenade for exactly one episode, only to land back hopelessly in the American alley. For her, ‘embracing the grey’ is merely a social media campaign she needs to sell to a client, and not the woke mantra she personally swears by.
Work meets life
This intersection between Emily’s work and life makes for an interesting insight in this season too. While bouncing ideas to sell Heartbreak, a crystal heart-shaped perfume for a client, she pitches a masquerade party. When Alfie, who is also in the room (after their break-up), rudely interjects and asks what the correlation between the two is, a teary-eyed Emily replies that wearing a mask liberates a heartbroken soul as they can be what they want to be.
Not just Emily, but even her no-nonsense boss Sylvie (a reliably bang-on Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) has this work-life epiphany when at the same party, she chooses to wear a mask on her exit, moments after having dropped her anonymity for a sexual harassment news story. “I’m not a victim. I wanted to tell my own story,” she tells her husband achingly, when he asks why she didn’t come out with the confession earlier – economically revealing a fleeting crack in her otherwise emotionally unavailable demeanour.
Beauty over mess
But that’s the thing about Emily in Paris, like its Miranda Priestly figure, the show also doesn’t let its vulnerability get messy. It broaches grave issues like sexual harassment at workplace or complex emotions like complicity with a sexual predator (by blood or otherwise) with a feather-like touch. These do brew across episodes, but the quick-fix resolutions dilute their severity and lasting consequences. However, demanding darkness from Emily in Paris is like looking for off the rack at a couture store – you’re knocking on the wrong door. The show should be lauded for at least acknowledging issues like these instead of brushing them under the Aubusson rug.
For what we flock to Emily in Paris, it delivers at full throttle. Chris Alan Lee’s carefully curated soundtrack set against Steven Fierberg’s stunning Paris frames are sprinkled all over the show fairly evenly. Slid in between every other couple of scenes, they reflect the effervescence of both Emily and Paris. Lily ensures that Marylin Fitoussi’s costumes pop up when she’s feeling it and serve as contrast to the bits where she’s down. Mindy (Ashley Park) and Bruno Gouery (Luc) get the funniest lines that are too specific to spell out here without context. But there are also done-to-death downers like Emily cribbing about Gabriel to Gabriel, assuming it’s Mindy in the shower, Luc mindlessly parroting the pitch of his colleague (who’s on the phone) in a meeting while also including what he’s not supposed to, and Emily falling flat on her face while admiring a hot man whooshing by.
In those moments, like Emily, the show also trips in its frothiness. There’s always ample scope for the characters to be sharper, the plot to be steeper, the dialogues to be zingier, and the humour to be witter, despite the beauty spilled all over. To quote a line from the show, when Emily tracks a missing character down to the birth of the Impressionism Movement, they tell Emily why it’s their chosen site for a refuge – “Look around you. Everything isn’t perfect, but all of it is beautiful.” That pretty much sums up the essence of Emily in Paris. Beauty doesn’t necessarily lie in its imperfections, but there’s enough of it to tide you through them.
