What have you heard about Sex and the City 2? That it's bad? Let me tell you: this may be the most radical, challenging film ever made.
- Sex and the City 2
- Production year: 2010
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 146 mins
- Directors: Michael Patrick King
- Cast: Chris Noth, Cynthia Nixon, David Eigenberg, Evan Handler, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Liza Minnelli, Miley Cyrus, Omid Djalili, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker
It is also deeply conservative. That combination has the capacity to blow minds. People will stagger out of cinemas in Tennessee and Arkansas, bug-eyed and dribbling. This could also happen in places where they weren't bug-eyed and dribbling on the way in.
The first oddness of the film comes from the fact that the creators of the TV series were evidently kidnapped, bound and hidden in a cupboard while the entire project was taken over by the hardline, religious right.
People who have always disliked the idea of Sex and the City, and misogynists (two groups with no insignificant crossover in the Venn diagram of cultural commentary), have been quick to explain how much they dislike the characters in the film: venal, vacuous slags, the lot of them. Commentators have written this up as though it is their own unique take. But this is Hollywood, the great manipulator: if your misogyny is tickled, that's because it is an intensely misogynistic movie. If you despise the women, it is because the film wants you to despise the women.
It would be impossible not to. Samantha (Kim Cattrall), once a confident, funny female character who enjoyed casual sex, is, in this film, demeaned, humiliated and punished like no woman has been since the great days of the Victorian novel. She is made grotesque.
She spills condoms, scrabbling on her knees in the dirt to pick them up. She pulls her knickers down to rub ointment into her vagina in a public office. Spotting a handsome man in a kaffiyeh, she screams: "He's Lawrence of my labia!" Dining in a restaurant, she gropes desperately at her companion's penis; his erection looms at the camera, horrified faces of fellow diners in soft-focus behind.
Meanwhile, her friends race around in an unnecessary fleet of gas-guzzling Mercedes, shrieking and salivating over hotel suites and shoes. Their souls are gone; nothing remains but cold, hard acquisition.
This must all be tremendously satisfying for those who disapproved of the single, self-motivated and sexually liberated women from the series. Look how it all turned out! The married ones find some happiness, once they surrender to joblessness and stop questioning their husbands' lust for large-breasted young nannies, but the one who stayed single? Ah, yes, she has developed into a desperate, shameful old whore.
Hence my assumption of a takeover by the American Christian right. As an ending to the story of these women, it reads like an extreme Calvinist pamphlet. It's like a film written by the sort of people who stand outside abortion clinics with misspelled placards and guns.
But the film would not boggle minds if it stopped there. In order to hammer home the women's vapid, degenerate existence, the story takes them out of New York and contrasts them with normal, right-thinking people. Does it take them, as a road trip naturally might, to the genteel parlours of the American south?
Why, no. It takes them to the United Arab Emirates. The people who stare in horror as Samantha crawls in the dirt are robed, bearded Muslims. And the audience. The people who look revolted as Samantha claws a man's balls at the dinner table are women in niqabs. And the audience.
The film confirms the darkest prejudices of the man or woman who despises sexually liberated New Yorkers, then holds up a mirror and shows them an Arab. This is quite astonishing, since it's appealing to the sort of moron who also tends to think that Arabs are raghead terrorists who need bombing into submission.
In one stunning metaphorical moment, the four chums are trapped in a souk, endangered, and dressed insensitively in shorts and plunging tops. Their escape comes – freedom is theirs – when they climb into burqas. Thus, its message is both the most conservative and the most radical we have seen in a Hollywood movie, possibly ever.
This morality tale appears to have the enormous ambition, the brave and culturally groundbreaking aim, of building bridges between religious extremists of east and west.
Sadly, it will take more than a rubbish film with bad puns to bring those groups together.
Laws, rules and idiocies
The old, sparky, witty, observational Sex and the City would have had enormous fun with the story of David Laws. The question that Carrie would be typing, as she sat smoking in her underwear, would be: "When does a relationship become 'a relationship'?"
Mr Laws has been far too apologetic about breaking this preposterous rule against "renting accommodation from a partner", which is a meaningless sentence when nobody knows what a "partner" really is.
Should an MP phone the parliamentary standards committee if he tumbles into bed once, drunk, with his landlord? Or are you allowed five shags before the government sees fit to deem it a partnership?
Are you allowed to claim back the room rental for as long as you haven't met each other's parents? Or does this become an expenses fiddle the first time you visit Homebase together? Are you allowed to claim rent paid to someone with whom you have watched an entire series of The Wire or only sporadic episodes?
The whole point of legalising civil partnerships was that "married" gay couples should have the same benefits, protections, tax credits and inheritance of tenancy agreements as straight couples. Not having undergone a civil partnership, David Laws does not have his relationship recognised by the state in any way that helps him. So why should it be recognised just to hinder him?
Until you have had a formal service, it's not for anyone else to say what is or isn't a partnership. The current parliamentary rule, for all practical purposes, can be translated only as: "You're not allowed to hump the landlord." And that's no rule for grown-ups.
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