Sex And The City 1 and 2

by Parsley on Thu, 2010/06/10 - 4:27pm Post to Twitter

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK

Film Review Double Bill: Sex and the City 1 and 2
Some people are concentrating on problems with our modern life: Are we destroying the planet? Is there corruption in the heart of politics and business? Meanwhile, other people are focusing their attention on the fashion world of the likes of Vogue magazine and Louis Vuitton handbags. This celebration of contemporary fashions finds some kind of vortex in the Sex and the City films.

At the risk of reinforcing gender stereotypes, I would say that like going to Ikea for the day, watching Sex and the City is how a man can prove to his female partner that he is her poodle. She in return may come to a football game, or to see his favourite band. Being about to watch the second of these films I felt I ought to watch the first just so I knew what was going on. Interestingly this box office smash was now available in my local Tesco for a fiver. In a way, given the amazing advertising opportunity that the show presents, it feels like they could almost give it away free. Never in one hit could fashion advertising otherwise reach such a well-focused target audience.

The story focuses on Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker if you haven’t inhabited the Earth long enough to know), her 3 friends, and their adventures, principally set in New York, and concerning their search for true love. Like a hen party, Sex and the City offers the female perspective on sexual behaviour, and so the ‘erotic’ sequences include moments like sex-crazed Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrall) watching her male neighbour showering in slow motion close-up. There is also a lot of sharing of relationships, as the girls discuss everything about their partners’ behaviour over dinner.

Carrie, who is a well known author, also writes about the relationships. We join the film as her relationship to Mr Big (the pet name for John Preston, played by Chris Noth) is going fine and they decide to get married. Now a 40-year old, Carrie gets interest from Vogue magazine, and the wedding event starts to balloon into major proportions. I won’t spoil what happens next, but the girls end up in Mexico having adventures together before the story comes to a weepie but satisfying conclusion. Several plot elements are packaged up into neat simplicity (the female partner in one adulterous affair doesn’t even appear), but there was enough for me to be interested in what was going to happen.

Emotionally exhausted from the roller-coaster of film 1 I had half an hour to recover before finding myself in front of a cinema screen for film 2. The first thing to say was that the cinema was full, despite the film having been out for a while. The second thing to say is that I was the only man in the house. I thought there was one other, but when the lights went up at the end it turned out to have been another woman. It became a fascinating sociological exercise, as the audience responded to a little girl handing out flower petals (‘aaahhh!’), and one of the main characters (married) kissing an old boyfriend (‘oooooooh!’).

The story begins with the wedding of two gay friends of the main characters, with a fair degree of stereotypical gay kitsch including Liza Minnelli presiding and performing. As a result of a meeting at the wedding, Samantha gets asked to do public relations work for a new hotel in Abu Dhabi, and talks her way into bringing her 3 friends with her for a free holiday there. Of course, she is also bringing us, the great unwashed audience, with her into first class planes and the luxury hotel with personal chauffeur/servants. Character acting regulars Art Malik and Omin Djalili made appearances in the key arab roles. There was less characterful insight than in the first film, but plenty of entertaining visuals and situations to keep us going.

A telling scene for me was when Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) have a heart to heart about motherhood over some serious drinks. They both expressed what hard work it was to be a mother, and then raised their glasses to women that coped with it without the aid of a nanny. This brought a laugh from the audience, who I presumed were mothers without the support of nannies. In fact the luxurious clothes and lifestyles of the characters make it into a dream vision of the material world. Whilst elements of the relationships will probably ring true for lots of people, the dining out and having a friend who will pick up the costs of resolving some major problem, is probably a bit further away from peoples’ everyday reality.

Sex and the City 2 has had some bad reviews, but it was quite clear that the departing female audience at the cinema were very happy with it, and I’d certainly found it had held my attention for its two and a half hour length. Both films get adult ratings for their sexual references and content, but the sex action is largely illustrative i.e. to show the characters do have sex, or in Samantha’s case almost comic, as her voracious sexual appetite is satisfied in explicit ‘bursts’ of action that seemed to get a laugh as an audience reaction.

So ‘guys’, what do we learn from watching these films? We learn that handbags, dresses and shoes are the currency of this kind of female life in the way that beer, cars and football are the assigned male domains. Women will talk excitedly about a new handbag in the same way that men might talk about a guitar or the last football game. So the behaviour patterns are the same, only the objects change. If you can learn the language of your other half you can be the hero that understands them.

Whilst enjoying the ride, I would say that there is definitely less in this for me than Desperate Housewives, currently showing on Channel 4, and having more well developed male roles, whilst still being heavily centred on relationship narratives. It is also has a good quirky sense of humour and is more ‘dark’ than Sex and the City.
Overall Review: Thumbs up for both films. The first is a good-natured fashion-following woman’s eye view of relationships and a very successful extension of the show’s franchise to the big screen. The second is a rather more crazy comic-book collection of ticklish ‘set pieces’, with a ‘Mamma Mia’ feel to it.

parsley.L @ virgin.net [http://freespace.virgin.net/alpha.moonbase/garden.records]