“I feel like Nicole Kidman in ‘Moulin Rouge’”
That was how Emily Cooper, a young American marketeer described her feelings towards Paris: an exotic dreamland she had always wanted to visit. With experience for which all the young professionals would envy, she moved from Chicago to Paris for work, and that mean an eye-opening journey laying ahead.
As a director of a renowned franchise like ‘Sex and The City’, Darren Star once again created a romantic dramedy piece that illustrated how it was like to be a strong young woman against the world, especially, a world called ‘Paris’, where the people constantly ignored those who didn’t speak French. The arrogance of the Parisians was legendary, and hundred-year-old building pipes were always broken when you used the shower. You could stumble upon a hot French neighbour who was coincidently a chef that saved your life at the last minute when you couldn’t reserve any table for your boss on Saturday night. Everything was so glamorous as well as threatening. Emily found it challenging to get to know the city as well as her boss and colleagues who thought she was a real nightmare. If this wasn’t a portrayal of Paris from exotic eyes, what could it be?
From a well-known 1978 book by Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’, the westerners from colonial period, especially from Europe (France and England) used to portray the land in the east of Europe as ‘exotic’. They created pictures of ‘the Orient’, mostly Arabic-Islamic cultures and India, as bizarre and barbaric as well as romanticising it to create lands that were vulnerable for exploration. What laid behind was Eurocentric prejudice that gave them power to rule the ‘inferior’ people of those lands and to exploit their lands. One of the example was how they usually pressed Christianity into local people’s life and commanded them to abandon their pre-existed faiths or religions with a claim that Christianity is the religion of the civilised. History of local people that proved them as competent was erased and redefined by the colonisers’ point of view to ‘educate’ local people and make them better human beings.
“Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.” – Edward W. Said, Orientalism
As well as what the westerners had done to the Arabs, Emily had a mission to educate her colleagues about modern technology like social media. She was even an influencer herself with numerous Instagram followers and must show the French how to be up-to-date and increase transparency in their organisation. For one time, her French client had to stop a fashion shoot because she couldn’t stand his ‘sexist’ portrayal of women’s dream. All the French people she knew had messed up some ways in their life, including Sylvie, her supervisor, who had an affair with her client. How unprofessional!
We cannot deny that America is a representation of modern day cultural imperialism, with Hollywood as its flagship. In Hollywood films, American culture is illustrated as ‘superior’ to others, including those of the ex-colonisers as the French and the British. American culture has massive power to speak for itself and it infiltrates every corner of the world. We can see the effects when America wants to exercise its power over some lands in the name of peace. And It’s ironic that the French, who used to be the colonisers, must try to decolonise themselves today by speaking up about how Paris really is and how to Parisians really behave, not how it ‘seems’ like in the eyes of the Americans!