I know, I know. No one walks twelve blocks in four inch heels, or has enough time every single week to set life aside to brunch with the ladies. Also, writers can’t afford the kind of Manhattan real estate the ladies of SATC live in. I know. Basically every single one of my girlfriends either doesn’t care about this movie, or is actively avoiding it for the prior reasons.
It seems that Sex and the City has become anathema to actual New York women. I can’t find a single peer who shared my excitement over the previews, or my urgency to see it early. Maybe it’s the idea that the rest of the country – you know, those middle parts – embraced the show and it’s characters so heartily as something they could relate to, and so the New Yorkers in my life have disregarded the series and the films as something they’re just not into.
Well lemme tell ya, ladies. It was fucking fantastic. And I couldn’t have landed a better Brooklyn audience of ladies to bask in the couture with. I have a special fondness for clapping in the theater when the character says something right, or audible reactions to thrilling moments, and I had a healthy serving of that tonight. (Thanks, anonymous strangers, for making debut night a blast.)
Definite spoiler alerts within, so be warned.
To begin with, the clothes. The clothes and the shoes and the accessories… It’s ridiculous and artful. The film is beautiful to look at. With no sound, and no dialog and no plot, I would watch it still. Andrew referred to the appeal of the film as a confection, and I think that describes the visual aspects of it especially well. Like cupcakes with a little too much icing, the sets and costuming were delicious in a guilt-making way.
To the producer’s and director’s credit, the icing is slathered heavily onto a nice respectable cupcake. The plot was real, and that’s what always brings me back to Sex and the City. The caricature aspects (jimmy choo in the dessert, Samantha in general) don’t outweigh the handling of real life issues, and those real life issues are served simply but smartly, and not without elegance in dialog and style.
Sarah Jessica Parker, who’s always annoyed me (what was with that weird tongue biting thing she used to do while writing?), gave a performance free from distraction. What I mean is, I’m often aware that I’m watching Sarah Jessica Parker acting. This time, she was just Carrie.
Cynthia Nixon, always the best actress in the series, was fantastic as usual. I wish I saw her in more. I liked the role they gave her this time. She was the most together and least troubled of the girls, serving as a believable steady in their wacky world.
The start was a little cold. As if on the first day of shooting, the actors all saw one another for the first time in years. Things warmed up quickly, though, and that didn’t prove to be a distraction for long.
The girls spend the larger part of the movie in Abu Dhabi (which is really Morocco because Abu Dhabi wasn’t havin’ none), and it seems some folks have said the depiction of Muslims in the film was troubling. To that, I say … nah. The depiction of Muslim women was, in fact, better than any other pop culture portrayal of Muslim women I’ve seen so far! Granted, I don’t spend a lot of time in the pop culture space, so maybe I’m missing some other great depictions out there. In Sex and the City 2, younger Muslim women who chose to wear headscarves were portrayed as glamorous and modern. More traditional Muslim women were given dimension, if only briefly toward the end, and were heroines to our four gals in some trouble.
The movie did depict some businessmen and the ultra wealthy as sleazy and undependable, but that doesn’t seem unfair. There were definitely other scenes that pushed some PC boundaries, but really I feel okay with those, too. For example, in a particularly “wow I can’t believe they did that scene”, Kim Cattrall in sweaty menopausal defiance (in yellow pleated shorts) humps the air in the center of an angry Middle Eastern mob. It was bound to happen that some woman in history would hump the air in defiance and wave condoms while shouting, “Yes, sex!” at a bunch of religious men in a Middle Eastern country, and if the time is now, then so be it!
There was one sort of sweet moment of perhaps political commentary where Carrie shows her leg to get a taxi. Earlier in the movie she’d seen an actress do the same in a 1920s film, and said to Big (now "John") something like, “How racy”. To which he replied, “It was then.” And so perhaps SATC2 was saying that the Middle East might just be at a certain point in a certain evolution, and that we were there once, too.
I liked the movie. I liked watching it, and I left the theater feeling far better than I felt going in. It’s the same sort of selfless pleasure our grandmothers’ generation got from steamy bodice ripper novels. Their mothers got it from Victorian era romance novels. Except now, a gentleman doesn’t necessarily turn up the cuff of a lady’s sleeve to caress the inside of her wrist covertly in a carriage. He fucks her on a land rover in the Hamptons.
I wonder, too, if my fondness for the films and the series isn’t due to something vicarious. I mean, sure. I wish my girlfriends and I all made the time to get dressed up and met at Bergdorf’s on … when do they do that anyway? Weekdays? Weekends? I wish our knees wouldn’t hurt while we traipse through the streets in shoes more expensive than a month’s rent in my college apartment, and with such high heels we’re walking on the tip tipiest of our toes. I wish that 1200 sq ft one bedrooms on the Upper West side could be had for a writer’s salary, and that the perfect cerulean for the bedroom wall would present itself at Lowe’s without the assistance of a designer.
More than all of that, though, I wish I had three best girlfriends who could all know and love one another equally. We’d each bring our unique and essential chemistry to a perfectly balanced friendship-concoction. And in the SATC world we’d always look fabulous, and would always be available past the fuckups and harsh words and different choices in life, for a trip to Abu Dhabi, or to brunch.
