Sylvie Grateau Is the True Star of Emily in Paris

There’s a scene in the second episode of Emily in Paris season 5 in which Sylvie Grateau (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) finds herself torn between two lovers. Her husband, Laurent (Arnaud Binard), has shown up unexpectedly in Rome to find his wife in the arms of handsome Italian film director Giancarlo (Raoul Bova). Sylvie and Laurent’s marriage is painfully Parisian, which is to say they sleep with whomever, whenever they please and prioritize independence and excitement over anything so pedestrian as monogamy. All should be copacetic, right?

But, Laurent is upset! Jealous of Sylvie’s dalliance, he nearly comes to blows with her paramour—who he had previously told Sylvie was “off-limits,” despite their arrangement—right there on the sand. Giancarlo, for his part, eggs him on and speaks for Sylvie as though she wasn’t standing right there, perfectly capable of defending herself.

Sylvie (rightly) concludes that both men are acting childishly and decides to punish them both by choosing neither. She stomps away in righteous anger, escaping not by foot or by cab but by a boat that’s docked nearby. She whips the speedboat away from the two men and jets off into the horizon, her see-through knit dress whipping in the wind while a French pop song plays her off.

It is a perfect scene, the textbook definition of camp. Where is she going? Who does the boat belong to? Which man will she choose in the end? The answers to these questions and more are irrelevant. For 30 beautiful seconds, all that matters is that Sylvie gets her moment in the sun.

This all had me begging the question—Emily, who?

Our titular Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) has nothing on Sylvie this past season. The latter’s exceptionally epic run during season 5 displayed the kind of reckless flair and horniness not seen on television since Samantha Jones—another PR maven from the mind of Darren Star—sashayed out of our lives with the final Sex and the City film in 2010. Sylvie’s storylines are ridiculous, her wardrobe obscene, her audacity unparalleled. And Leroy-Beaulieu, the woman who brings Sylvie to life, gave 110% to her this season, committing to all the absurdity we could ever hope to see on a television show called Emily in Paris.

“I think every season’s a great season for Sylvie, but I particularly love this season,” creator Darren Star recently told Glamour. “The more we find out about her, I think you just get such a 360 view of Sylvie, and I love digging into her character and dealing more with the complications of her personal life.”

While Emily is busy repressing her anger toward Mindy (Ashley Park) and Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) and overanalyzing her future with Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini), channeling her millennial ennui into another silly work event, Sylvie is the embodiment of joie de vivre. She revisits an old friend she hasn’t seen in decades; they had a falling out, the cause of which neither could agree upon. (To hazard a guess, it was probably Sylvie’s fault.) The rekindling of this former friendship just so happened to overlap with Sylvie’s latest cinq à sept lover, a much younger man whose age she doesn’t overthink the way a hyper-self-aware Emily most definitely would have.