Sex and the City: The movie

I was a casual fan of Sex and the City: the television series. It was revolutionary in portraying the lives of cosmopolitan women plus the frankness it brought to women talking about sex and relationships. The series evolved over the years and the focus of the characters and storylines shifted as the show grew up. At the end of the day aren’t all women looking for a stable life partner? I’m not going to get into the debate whether the show sold out its strongly independent women in favour of monogamous conventional relationships and families. This is about the movie…

I have my doubts about movie spin-offs of TV series (surely it takes something special to bring a how delivered in weekly 42 minute blocks on a small screen to a length of over 90 minutes on the big screen). On an aside, why on earth is there another movie of The X Files coming out over 6 years after the TV series finished? One thing is for sure, there is huge market out there for films focused on women’s lives. The session I went to was sold-out, the cinema filled with women and perhaps only four men. The women collectively sighed, gasped and cried at the appropriate points in the film. It is encouraging to see Hollywood cinema providing starring roles for women in their forties, with active female characters who driving the storylines. The shortage of juicy roles for women in their forties in Hollywood is well known. They are usually reduced to supporting roles as mothers or wives, the occasional deranged psychotic or are midday movie melodramas. And it’s the not the same for men! They continue being romantic and action leads into their fifties and sixties, think Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford.

So women are flocking in droves to see it but what about the actual movie? In a nutshell it is boring. This is for two main reasons. Firstly it is too far long. There is not enough depth in the script to sustain its 148 minute length. It could have easily been trimmed to a more manageable 90 minutes with a bit less female whingeing, moping and over–reacting. Secondly, the main storyline (involving, of course Carrie and Big) was not interesting enough to base a whole film around. So he almost left her at the altar but he was coming back! Yes she might have felt humiliated and angry but everyone knows she will get over it (after all she is hardly going to go out looking for a new man at this stage and the film does not even consider this option). Good script writing creates tension and intrigue; it backs its characters into a corner and then finds interesting ways to get them out of it. Put simply the stakes were not high enough! Carrie had nothing to lose. He was just waiting for her to get over it. She was never at risk of losing him or doubting their love. Even what makes her forgive him is lame. Surely the script writers could have come up with a better drama for a feature length film.

But perhaps it’s always been that Carrie’s friends have had the more interesting storylines. In the film it is Miranda who has the most interesting character arc. At least there is something at stake here. She has been betrayed by her husband and there is child caught in the middle of it. There is some tension created wondering whether they will both turn up to reconcile but again there is never any sense it could happen any other way. As for Charlotte and Samantha their stories make little impact. It is dominant ideology writ large. Charlotte is rewarded for her conservative values by martial bliss and pregnancy, with nothing essentially bad happening to her. Samantha, forever the promiscuous one, is finally punished by ending up as the only single one celebrating her 50th birthday. All the film pretty much does is slightly rock the equilibrium then restore it…for 148 minutes!

The other problem I had with the film was that the sex out of Sex and the City! The TV series was made famous by its sexy banter and for the most part this was gone, instead dominated by domestic drama. The famous café gossip scenes were turned into pseudo baby-sitting excursions with the characters’ children in the background of most scenes and explicit sex scenes were far and few between. I suppose this is a part of growing up and as the characters (and actresses) get older their priorities change. There was, however, a great example of objectifying the male body in the fetishised, cutting up the body with close-ups-kind of way, usually associated with the female form.

What the film does well (as the show did) is portraying the friendship between a group of women, which ranks above that of their relationships with men. The scenes of female camaraderie were the most touching. Guys may come and go but your female friends will always be there!