And so I got to thinking….what the Hell am I doing here? As I watched a preview of Sex and the City at the Soho Hotel last night, with Trevor Phillips nodding off beside me, I realised that the reason was nostalgia: pure and simple. Fantastic television (into which category SATC undoubtedly fell) rapidly becomes frozen and institutionalised in memory, and this movie is a straightforward and very slick exercise in heritage culture. I enjoyed it less than the new Indiana Jones, but the reason I went was exactly the same.
Ten years after the programme first aired and four years since the series ended, Carrie and the girls are doing – well, pretty much what they used to do, which is to agonise about relationships, sex and babies. Darren Starr’s genius in creating SATC from the thin gruel of Candace Bushnell’s original columns was to put on the small screen intimate female discussions that thrilled women and amazed men (there could be no male SATC: it would be too boring). But it is amazing no longer, nor very thrilling. The shock of the new has now been definitively replaced by knockabout sitcom pleasure. Contrary to much of the pre-release hype, there is absolutely nothing in the film which you haven’t seen a dozen times before (Charlotte and fertility, Miranda’s on-off with Steve, Samantha’s promiscuous urge and, of course, Carrie’s decade-long crisis with Big).
That said, it is a tribute to the cast and the strength of characterisation that this essentially schmaltzy pay-off to the saga keeps you watching and laughing until the (completely predictable) end. The one poker player’s “tell” in the film is that it establishes beyond doubt, once and for all, that this four-player drama was never really about sex at all, that its HBO raunchiness concealed a timeless soft centre: the choric fairy godmother role is played by a young PA hired by Carrie, Louise from St Louis, with a bracelet that says “Love”. Nuff said. The movie is a shameless fairy tale which sandpapers over the original coarseness of the series, renounces its appealingly provisional feel in favour of a grand finale, betrays much of what first made SATC so gripping, but is still pleasing to the eye and, in its engaging simplicity, the heart.
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