Two American women move to France to have a very different experience
by Mackenzie Thomas
Luxury, gourmet cuisine, fashion, and art. We think of these things when we hear of Paris, the city of love and light. Oftentimes, most people link Paris and France together, as if they were interchangeable with one another. We are taught to do this because of shows such as Emily in Paris. The trope at hand is that of the American woman moving abroad in order to find change and meaning within her life, something she has yet to find in her life in America. Emily in Paris romanticizes this experience and allows audiences to feel as though they are experiencing the escape of moving abroad.
By contrast, in the short film, Plaisir by Molly Gillis, the twenty-something Eleanor tries to escape America for a completely different life in southern France to work on a farm in order to become better at being by herself. This proves to be starkly different from the promised life abroad with Emily in Paris. As Eleanor is hitting a cultural barrier, Gillis’s 19-minute film conveys through sound, movement, and landscapes that communication and living in harmony with one another does not have to rely on language, whereas Emily in Paris conflates escape with luxury living and romance, and relies greatly on the English language.
We first encounter Eleanor on a train. We hear the screeching of the rails, the rustling nature of the car she is in, an announcement warning passengers to not forget their personal belongings, and their destination of Avignon, a town in the South of France. Eleanor listens attentively to an audio guide teaching her various phrases and words, such as “Why are you here?” This signals to the audience that she is most likely asking herself the same question. When she sits at the train station waiting for her coworker to come pick her up, we hear another train coming in, and the hallmark sound for the French train systems begins playing over the intercom.
The woman who comes to pick her up is the second-most important character to the story. She highlights the differences between herself and Eleanor. The most notable of these is the fact that neither one of them speaks much of the other’s language, so throughout the film, they are forced to communicate by means of body language, customs and traditions, and movement. This hypothesis is further reinforced via the director’s personal influence and admittance to not being good at French when she arrived to work on a farm in France herself, and wanting to “explore how we build relationships beyond language,” as found in the review on the film.
Comparatively, when Emily arrives in Paris in Darren Star’s show, she is approached with the language barrier, but immediately found by a French man, her future love interest, who speaks perfect English, along with her team at work who all conform to her needs to speak English in the French office. Emily laughs off her inability to understand, oftentimes, and stumbles around with a naïveté about her. In addition, she moved from Chicago, a big city, to Paris, the most well-known city in France, let alone in the world. Her escape was drastically different from that of Eleanor’s.
There is a striking scene between Eleanor and the other workers living on this farm where they work. They sit at an outdoor table and talk about how Eleanor does not speak French, all the while they are eating. We see and hear workers sucking their fingers and licking their plates while glasses clink around the table. Eleanor watches their behavior and begins to emulate it even though she had only been using silverware to eat previously. Emily, in contrast, takes long work lunches with her coworkers and pleasurable dinners with her friend that consist of steak and copious amounts of wine. Silverware is a must in the Parisian environment. So, while Emily is becoming more accustomed to luxury, Eleanor is being worked and stripped down to a grounded human while she works on the farm for hours day in and day out.
Eleanor then explores the property where she lives. We hear rustling leaves, birds, and the sweeping wind. Each of these is put in contrast with the loud sounds of her lugging her suitcase to her yurt. This brings us to realize that there is a pattern for Americans who flock abroad to start anew and have experiences different to those than they have ever had before.
Throughout the film we continue to hear Eleanor’s progress with her French in voice overs that compliment montages of her time with the other workers. Her verbal communication improves, but so does her relationship with the others on the property and her ability to embrace French culture. We see this in an impromptu lesson between the protagonist and the most prominent worker about the dancing meditation practice of “butoh”. They take turns showing each other how they move their bodies with and without music. Even though “butoh” is different from the dancing that Eleanor knows (because she prefers to use music), the two share in a moment of simplistic, carefree dancing before sharing a cigarette. The commonality between each dance movement, sound of inhaling and exhaling cigarette smoke, and music, is that each of these creates a shared experience that both people can enjoy, despite the lack of knowledge on how to verbally communicate with one another.
While Eleanor emulates what her coworkers are doing around her, Emily never quite fully embraces her experience of living in France. A clear example of this can be seen when she is taken to the hammam, a spa located in a mosque, and every other woman around her embraces the topless/nude norm, while she remains covered in a towel. And even though she is in French lessons, she refuses to speak in the native language consistently with members of her work team and her French boyfriend. Eleanor is forced to conform to the environment around her in order to make use of herself and find meaning from her time on the form, whereas Emily relies almost exclusively on her ability to communicate via language and expression through her fashion choices.
With each montage in the film Plaisir we hear more complex phrases in French, an increase in her positive experiences, and her engaging in the practices she has learned from the others such as when she takes the time to light her own cigarettes. Everything culminates at the end of the film with a meditative experience that all of the workers are encouraged to participate in. They are given the opportunity to strip nude and have a private walk in the garden. Eleanor strips naked and allows her body to feel the movement she learned through her “butoh” lesson.
Plaisir, in the end, varies in how people interpret it. While Emily finds her “plaisir” through luxury in the city life of Paris, Eleanor finds her “plaisir” in the freedom of working in the dirt and escaping her life in America. In “The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory” we see that Sobchack asserts “‘If we are to understand how we understand the film experience, why it has significance for us, and why we care about it, we must remember that experience as located in the lived-body,’ Sobchack argues and simultaneously ascribes film a task in the face of the contemporary historical moment, ‘the crisis of the lived body’”. They go on further in saying that the viewer and film are in an intersubjective relationship in which the viewer experiences what is happening on screen. Despite the fact that Plaisir is almost entirely in French, the viewer is able to experience the uncomfortability that the cultural and language barrier places on her, whereas Emily in Paris never crosses the line here. In putting the whole film in French, we are able to use the non-verbal cues such as body language to understand the story, which proves to be more rich in experience for the viewer than watching Emily in Paris.
In the end, we can say that Plaisir is the antithesis of Emily in Paris. Plaisir is set apart from other works of cinema because it relies on non-verbal communication in order to provoke understanding from the audience, in place of communication with direct language usage.