New Line Cinema
Sex and the purse, pumps, and penthouse
Sex and the City: The Movie is larger-than-life — not in a good way
By Nona Willis Aronowitz
Published: June 2nd, 2008 | 10:50pm
When the creeping rumors were confirmed that the HBO series Sex and the City was about to be a movie, women everywhere rejoiced — myself included. Sure, I winced during the Sex moments when men came before, well … everything. It always irked me that the last season was more couture and celebrity than girl-night sleepovers and talk about blowjobs. But there is something about that mischievous theme song, those mouth-watering shock statements, and those straight-up heartbreaks that kept me an ardent fan. When I say “It’s like that time on Sex and the City…” I get vigorous nods from every woman in the room. I was practically squirming in my seat when the opening credits rolled.
And my face promptly fell. Our familiar characters were all there: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the fabulous-slash-vulnerable city sex columnist; Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the on-edge workaholic; Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the outrageous sexpot; and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is the happiest of the four with a husband, child, and bun in the oven. Big’s there, too, still the perennial heartbreaker whom every woman secretly rooted for back in the day and who is sadly unappealing here (and I’m not just talking about his over-applied bronzer).
But there were many other characters added to the mix, ones that made my stomach turn at every ostensibly joyful moment: Louis Vuitton. Vivienne Westwood. Manolo Blahnik, Vogue, Prada, multimillion-dollar real estate. They had been there all along on the show, demurely sparkling in the background as the four women rode their love-sex rollercoasters. But in the film, they are the epicenter of the women’s lives, smoothing things over at a disturbingly frequent pace (not to mention that we almost never see the girls working, a far cry from the series where Carrie often slaved over her laptop or Miranda pulled late hours at the office).
Perhaps the most unnerving storyline of all is that of Carrie’s personal assistant, Louise (Jennifer Hudson). Clearly the point was to throw in a woman of color, but unfortunately the only one in sight is at the beck and call of an emotionally distraught white woman, resulting in one of the most blatant Mammy figures since Queen Latifah in that Steve Martin movie. Louise coos, jokes, and nurses Carrie back to health, all the while never receiving any of Carrie’s writing expertise in return. In the end, all she really gets is a Louis Vuitton bag as a souvenir before she heads for St. Louis to marry the nice black boy she left behind.
Thank god Cattrall rethought her refusal to be in the movie in the first place, because Samantha is the best part of it. Not only does she deliver most of the one-liners in the film, but she ends up being the strongest and most independent of the four, eventually choosing herself and her happiness over the often stymied world of financial and emotional co-dependence.
The last minutes of the film are both the most comforting and the most confounding, when Carrie betrays all her beloved Labels by claiming that they don’t matter. It feeds us a breathe of fresh air — phew! Carrie is actually a real person — but more importantly, the quick fix ending exposes the film’s grave ambivalence about the role consumerism plays in female happiness.
Issue #33
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more