FILM
REVIEW – SEX AND THE CITY (2008)
Big screen follow up to the long running, ground breaking TV series about a quartet of New York women pursuing sex and love in their thirties – As the film is set four years on from the last aired episode, the women have now turned 40, (with Samantha, (Kim Catrell) almost 50 – (the film ends soon after her 50th birthday celebrations).
Much of the plot centres on the aftermath to Carrie’s (SJP) doomed dream wedding to Big (Chris Noth) which goes horribly wrong when he has a fit of nerves and jilts her at the altar. He is trying to put the crisis right, but he is too late to get back before the plug is closed on the event. The wedding plans were just too lavish for him, with Carrie’s authorship gaining her a high publicity profile in Vogue, for who she writes a column. Big feels overshadowed by his bride, as he is a quiet unassuming businessman with two failed marriages behind him already.
Much of the film deals with the aftermath of the break up, as her friends rally to raise Carrie (called Candace Bushnell in the novels, after the author) from her depression. Matters are made worse by Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) having left her husband, after he admits to having made a mistake and having had sex with another woman, when Miranda has kept him virtually celibate in the six months she has faced of maintaining her job and raising her child too. The middle section of the film is surprisingly downbeat, but gradually, thanks to a vivacious and just starting out in love, but quite wise and bubbly secretary, Louise (Jennifer Hudson) Carrie slowly comes to terms with being single and happy again.
Carrie and Miranda blame each other for the collapse of their relationships, and each hopes the other will come to forgive the man who did the other wrong.
Samantha seems initially happier in life, being with a Californian hunk, who she stays with while he is working on the coast, between jetting to New York and Mexico to be with Carrie when required, but her boyfriend keeps working late, and she finds herself attracted to a hunky neighbour who seems to constantly be making love to different women (sometimes to more than one at a time0. Depressed, she buys a pet dog, but even that has more sex than she does, and even makes love to handbags and cushions at every opportunity. Samantha gets heavily into comfort food, and by the end of the film, she is developing a weight problem – the only one of the four central characters with an unresolved crisis by the film’s finale.
Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has a genuinely settled married life, and she is expecting a child. Like the other girls; she goes with Carrie to Mexico on what should have been the honeymoon with Big. Despite her efforts to avoid eating local food to avoid food poisoning, (smuggling her own food into restaiurants0, she gets a stomach bug from shower water that spills into her mouth and ends up failing to make the lavatory in time to save herself considerable embarrassment in front of front of her friends, (the first instant in which Carrie laughs and breaks free of her depression.
Charlotte also has a storyline focussed on her less forgiving attitude to Big. Seeing him by chance in a restaurant in New York a few weeks before her baby is due, she confronts him angrily but in doing so sets off her labour. Big ends up helping get her to hospital, and in the process sets in motion a chain of events leading to his reunion with Carrie, leading to their discreet wedding at City hall, without designer label gowns or razzmatazz, followed by ham & eggs at an ordinary New York Diner. Miranda is there with her husband too, and they too have now reunited. The other girls and various minor characters also come along.
It’s a lovely film, with more focus on Rom-Com and with a strangely despairing middle section, and less focus on the daring sex-talk and candid soul searching that made the series work so well. It’s more about loyalty and friendship than love & sex, but for all that it isn’t bad.
If there are negatives it is the absence of the main TV show’s distinctive, excellent jazzy theme tune, replaced here by a dreadful rapping song, The film also has some of the most prolonged and blatant product placement I have ever seen – some of this is actually integrated into the main story plot – Vogue magazine run the fashion shoot featuring Carrie in various wedding dresses, with the labels being described clearly as she tries each, settling finally on a Viviane Westwood creation, which is then presented to her for her actual main wedding. Characters spend a lot of time in Starbucks, and actually move coffee cups round to show the logo off more clearly. This is partly redeemed in the final scenes when the cast take part in Carrie’s simple no frills wedding, in a modest environment, free of fancy designer labels – a necessary message given the way most of the film is saturated in labels – much of the theme is on how easily we label and stereotype people too. The mighty rich beautiful people have been humbled and have become like the ordinary people of New York. The final tracking shot shows ordinary people in an ordinary city. It’s an interesting ending to a fascinating series, and overall, for its flaws, it is a very good film.
Arthur Chappell
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