And as I have spent the last week watching the latest iteration of the clueless American — Emily Cooper, a social media whiz assigned to a French marketing company, in Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” — I have been reflecting on my long and complicated relationship to France. And that brings me to “Emily in Paris.” Within the clichés were grains of truth. “People will think you are stupid.” Americans smile at strangers; Parisians do not, which helps explain why some Americans find Parisians rude. In his best seller “American Vertigo,” the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy railed against the “emotionless” smiles of American strangers. The smile is too fraught, too deliberate to be bestowed as a mere pleasantry in France, he later told me.

Source: International New York Times October 08, 2020 06:33 UTC