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Some people can’t imagine anything worse than an evening in the company of drunk women watching four middle-aged has-beens get laid and talk about their neuroses.
Well, try doing that on your own. This is what happened to me on Monday evening after I discovered that I had absent-mindedly bought tickets for me and three friends for the 5.30pm showing of Sex and the City 2 instead of the 7.30pm showing. Luckily, a kind usher nabbed us the last seats in the house, but they were all in different places. So we each sat alone, paper cups of prosecco in hand, sandwiched between groups of girls getting hammered and talking loudly about ex-boyfriends’ bedroom habits, which of Carrie’s clothes they liked best and whether Samantha is past it. Not quite the evening with the girls I had planned.
The problem is, SATC is really only fun these days if you have companions to mock it with. What used to be a fresh take on feminism, singledom and, yes, clothes, is now an absurd pastiche of its former self, where women’s lib is represented by Dior and where not eating out two nights a week equals social death.
Here is the basic plot: two years have passed since the last film, when Carrie Bradshaw, relationship guru and shoe obsessive, finally married Mr Big after a decade of chasing. Charlotte, the “nice” one, has her bald but loveable husband Harry and two children, fiery Miranda is still a lawyer, reunited with Steve and mother to Brady, and Samantha, who broke up with Absolut Hunk, Smith Jared, in SATC 1, is back to her old tricks as a cougar extraordinaire.
Hurrah, viewers may think – a happy ending for all. Not so much. All the girls are worried about something: Carrie about the dull domesticity of life with a Big who actually wants her, Miranda about her work/life balance and Samantha about her ageing body and diminished libido. (Incidentally, Samantha’s cancer in Series Six already kicked her into early menopause, so unless it’s been going on for seven years, the writers have missed a trick here.) Charlotte is nervous about Harry’s attitude to the hot, bra-less nanny, played by Brit actress, Alice Eve, with whom I actually went to school. There she was, rather fittingly, known as “big-boob Alice”.
It’s not a bad plan, tackling the minor issues that women obsess about. So what if they are all happy – does that mean they can’t complain about anything? And it’s enormously enjoyable to see what the girls are up to. If, like me, you’ve watched every episode in the original series dozens of times, a chance to see them again is like catching up with old friends. My favourite moment was without a doubt the eighties flashback. Cue bad perms, sheer leggings and the answer to one of things I had always wondered about – how the four met.
The problem is that the four women we used to love – precisely because they were flawed, lonely and a touch neurotic – are now just obscenely materialistic, incredibly selfish and really, really boring. The writers themselves have clearly realised this, which is why they pack them off on a glitzy PR trip to Abu Dhabi – “the new Middle East”. They could not have made a worse decision. Abu Dhabi (which incidentally refused to have the movie filmed there – it is actually shot in Marrakech) is, as far as SATC is concerned, as consumerist, vapid and absurd as the girls themselves. The four ooh and ah, mesmerised, it seems, by this mystical, foreign land – except that all they are looking at is a modern hotel shaped like an Arabian Palace, with lots of pools and the Australian rugby team.
They discuss the merits of the veil (“How does she eat her french fries with that on?”) and Samantha tries hard to respect local culture by touching a man indecently in a crowded restaurant, showing off her oral skills on a shisha pipe and standing in a male-dominated souk and shouting “Yes I’m a woman, I have sex!”. The crowning moment of cultural integration is when the Emirati women remove their veils to show off hideous (and probably hideously expensive) designer gear underneath. Just like us, see.
As someone who categorically thinks the veil is wrong, I usually think it’s great to see the subject tackled on screen. What is not great is seeing it done so crudely – so outrageously and disrepectfully – that it undoes all the hard work writers, politicians and diplomats have done to improve relations with the Middle East and our own understanding of it. What on earth possessed the writer and director, Michael Patrick King, to think this elsewhere light-hearted film was a good platform for mocking Islamic values? Who were the test audiences that laughed at the really rather racist jokes?
It’s true, largely speaking, that trendy city-dwellers in modern Islamic countries like to don high fashion under their hijabs. But actually theirs is the worst example of consumerism because it is so accelerated in countries like this that it is all about bling and not a bit about style. Money is the point, not some kind of sisterhood. Isn’t there a better example of shared values, like when Carrie meets the French fan of her book in the final series?
There are ghosts of the old SATC lurking here. Critics have panned the scene where Carrie gets upset because Big buys her a giant flatscreen TV for their bedroom on their anniversary. Poor her, they joke – a really expensive gift, how awful! But this is just the kind of embarrassing female confession that SATC used to be so good at. Women do want men to buy them personal gifts, things that prove they really understand them. And keeping the remote under your pillow is definitely a bit of a passion-killer. The message here is valid, it is just somewhat diluted because the messenger has become such a whiny brat.
While the first film was fun but a bit flat in places, its sequel is shamelessly inane and vulgar. Its basic premise, whittled down from all the shoes, gay jokes and bigoted travel advice, is that some women are just never happy. Which may well be true, in a way. But it sure ain’t pretty to watch.
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