Reviews
Sex and the City
Directed by Michael Patrick King
Certificate 15, 148 mins
The television series Sex and the City was never that radical. For all the sexual liberation enjoyed by the thirty-something NewYork singletons Carrie Bradshaw and her girlpals Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, by the final series each was duly in a committed relationship. The sole remaining 40-year-old party girl tripped on her Manolos and toppled out of a six-storey apartment window as if the scriptwriters didn’t know what else to do with a woman that age and still alone.
This much-hyped movie version starts off on the same foot. It’s bad enough that Carrie’s scene-setting voiceover declares, ‘Women come to New York in search of the two Ls: labels and love.’ (Really? A major world city, and for women that’s it?) But it’s four years later and there’s an initial queasy smugness hovering over the glossy friends as dripping in dollars and design label finery, they continue to flit together through Manhattan’s bars and clubs. And Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is at last to wed her Mr Big. Even Vogue is doing a special spread on the 40 year old bride. Cue Pretty Woman-style dressing up for the photo shoot.
Yet such fluffiness doesn’t last long. The writer/director Michael Patrick King bravely takes the fairy tale assumptions that are tied up with the cultural myth of marriage and turns them squarely on their head. Each of the women faces a struggle in her relationship. The Big Day is only the beginning (and perhaps not even that). It is made clear that any happy endings to come will have to be earned, through trust, compromise and forgiveness. Even Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is stymied by her sense of her own good fortune in having a loving husband, beautiful adopted daughter, and now pregnancy. Something has to go wrong sometime, right? For all the undoubted Hollywood glitz, there’s emotional realism too.
That’s not to say that Sex and the City doesn’t contain the laughs and sweetness of the television show. Kim Catrell as the risque´Samatha still has the best lines (Smith, her toyboy hunk boyfriend: You seem kinda distant.’ Samantha: ‘Distant? You’re still in me.’). For fans of the television series, a reconciliation scene on Brooklyn Bridge is as sniff-inducing as Harry’s proposal at the Jewish dating agency to the new convert Charlotte. There’s even a touching New Year’s Eve montage sequence that seems to have been stolen from Love Actually.
As in Notting Hill, friendship is seen to be vital for getting people through both good and bad times. By the end of the movie, Samantha is unattached again, and yet to her mates, and to the cinema audience as well, it is obvious that she is ‘fifty and fabuous’, and her life clearly far from over. What would have been interesting is to see whether she could carve out her own third way between the sexual extremes of unbridled hedonism and abstinence.
But the point about Sex and the City is that sex isn’t really the point. The film, like the series, is a paean to friendship between middle-aged women whether single or partnered, mothers or not. It is a welcome and inclusive call to all to share the same table.
Catherine von Ruhland
Post a comment