(Paris) Camp a sexy and caustic French boss in Emily in Paris not only allowed Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu to relaunch her career. At 59, the Franco-Italian almost eclipses Lily Collins, the young star of the Netflix series.
On the platform, it can be seen both in Ten percent (for which Cédric Klapisch had called on her when his career was at a standstill), Emilywhich will launch it internationally, and the final season of The Crown.
In Emily in Paris – whose season 3 will be broadcast from Wednesday – she camps Sylvie Grateau, a director of a French luxury marketing agency who reluctantly welcomes Emily Cooper from the United States.
A character infused with American clichés about the Parisienne: chic, thin, disdainful, perched on endless heels, cigarette in mouth.
But under her air of a brittle boss and femme fatale, the character comes to tease the injunctions of society with regard to women over 50.
“The underlying message of the show is that regardless of people’s ages and backgrounds, Darren (Star, show creator and cult Sex and the City) advocates a certain freedom of the characters, ”says AFP Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu.
“These characters say that we have to break certain labels, that people are multifaceted, we don’t have to judge them,” she adds.
In season 2, Sylvie Grateau begins a love affair with a photographer younger than her and suffers a remark from a waitress who takes her for her mother. “In season 3, we will see more of her vulnerability,” says the actress.
The sexual life of women in their fifties is currently on screen with films where Emma Thompson (My dates with Leo) and Cecile de France (The passenger) are forming relationships with younger men.
“Inspiring”
“Let’s stop showing only young women as objects of desire”, confided Cécile de France recently to the magazine She.
For Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, however, the series and the characters should not be over-interpreted.
One day, “Darren asked me if we could learn from French women their freedom. Compared to American women who are more prisoners of certain codes, we have this reputation… which is not necessarily true”, she says.
Cliché or not, her character captivated Yvonne Hazelton, an American author who lived in Paris and wrote about the city and the series.
“Sylvie’s character is the most fascinating; she is inspiring,” she told AFP. In addition to her sense of chic, “she is competent and masters every situation, even in the face of problems”.
While “American women are generally more conservative, it’s fair to say that many middle-aged women behave” like Sylvie in terms of romantic relationships. “For a woman like me who divorced in her early fifties, the feeling of freedom that we feel is enormous,” says the author.
Nominated for the Césars in 1986 for her role in Three men and a bassinetthe one who had started her career with Roger Vadim, became the embodiment of the Parisian, while paradoxically she had hated Paris in the past.
Having grown up in Rome alongside her actor father and her mother who worked for the Dior house, she had returned to Paris after their divorce and often spoke of the humiliations of her high school friends who made fun of her level of French.
Today, she revels in the role of the Frenchwoman who makes life a bit difficult for the ingenuous American.
“There is an America that, like Emily, wants to conquer the world and knows how to do everything better than the world, but it comes up against someone like me who says to it: ‘I am Asterix and I will not let you in on my territory,” she smiles.