By now I’m sure that just about everyone in America is familiar with the four women at the center of this franchise (I pity anyone who isn’t familiar with them because the film makes no attempt to familiarize the audience with them). In Sex and the City 2, the four women are given exactly one issue each and, despite its gargantuan 146-minute running time, little to no progress is made on three of the four. It’s actually sort of astonishing how little happens in this movie.
This lack of narrative momentum may owe to the fact that these characters are far too old to be behaving the way they do. These women are all in their late forties to early fifties and there’s just no believable reason why they’d be acting like clueless twentysomethings. Maybe fifteen or twenty years ago Samantha’s incessant one-liners and puns about the joys of sex might have come off differently. But now they’re just creepy and sort of horrifying. Even if this woman really really really loves sex, incessantly declaring it in public as loudly as possible is not some kind of feminist rallying cry. It’s just sad and pathetic. (And for someone who supposedly enjoys sex, every time she’s actually shown having it, she’s having the most boring missionary position sex possible.)
The same goes for the rest of the ‘girls.’ They are such selfish, oblivious ingrates that there’s no way the audience can identify with their ‘problems.’ Maybe if Charlotte wasn’t a spoiled Park Avenue princess with a live-in nanny, her struggles with motherhood might actually be relatable. Maybe if Carrie and Big didn’t have two ridiculously opulent Manhattan apartments, her worries about always staying home might seem a little more valid. And maybe if Miranda’s biggest problem was something more than missing the occasional elementary school science fair due to her enormously successful law career, her story might be a little more involving.
Perhaps to draw attention away from how ridiculous and clueless these women are, the film spends most of its time ogling ridiculously expensive handbags, shoes, cars, houses and locations. When the action shifts to Abu Dhabi halfway through, the film grinds to a halt for five minutes so the camera can linger over the opulent surroundings. The women just wander around their lavish hotel suite ooh-ing and aah-ing. We get it. It’s opulent. Just like everything else in the damn movie.
And that’s when it dawned on me that Sex and the City 2 isn’t really attempting to be a movie in the traditional sense (i.e. a cohesive story told in about two hours) but rather is really just a machine for generating as many aww’s, ooh’s and oh’s as it can. Everything that’s ever provoked that singularly female ‘aaaawwww’ (you know the one) or the covetous ‘ooohhhh’ is featured in this movie, twice: cute kids (preferably wearing extremely cute clothing), couture worth more than most viewers make in a year, massive closets full of shoes, manservants waiting on the women hand and foot, gay men getting married, etc. It’s like a video version of Vogue, The Robb Report and the J. Crew kids catalogue drawn out for two and half hours.
With that in mind, it’s more or less futile to chronicle the dreadful characterizations or plot developments (such as they are). When the people making the movie (and the people lining up to buy tickets) aren’t actually interested in that stuff, what’s the use in pointing out how profoundly stupid all of it is? And if everyone involved in making this film didn’t insist that there was anything more to it than that, I’d be fine with it. It would still suck as a film, of course, but it would be more or less harmless. But the film asserts at every turn that these vapid, self-absorbed, ignorant women represent the height of feminism, even having them sing a karaoke version of ‘I Am Woman’. But when put up against what these women actually stand for, it seems that the film’s view of the pinnacle of female empowerment is crass materialism and total self-interest.
The film’s most troubling moment comes at the end of the Abu Dhabi sequence (actually filmed in Morocco but what’s the difference, all those Muslim countries are interchangeable, right?) when the women are being chased by a crowd of angry men (because Samantha threw condoms in their faces and screamed, ‘I love sex!’). They find sanctuary with a group of Muslim women covered head to toe in burkas who, moments later, reveal that under their formless black robes they’re actually wearing all the latest Western fashions just like our heroines. The implicit message is that these women, previously the object of much pity, are just fine because they’re as cravenly materialistic and label-obsessed as Carrie and Co. The film confuses the freedom to be a spoiled bitch with actual freedom. And it’s that very idea, that imposing our culture on others is somehow liberating, that is the reason much of the Muslim world hates us. They don’t hate our freedom. They hate the way we impose our culture on them and call it freedom. That’s imperialism, not liberation.
That confusion is indicative of what Sex and the City has become. It claims to be enlightened and feminist while actually being the exact opposite. The first Sex and the City film was terrible but only mildly distasteful. The sequel is aggressively offensive. My only hope is that this film is so nakedly and profoundly wrong in every way that no one can be suckered into buying into its appalling ideas about female empowerment and liberation.
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