SUMMER SIZZLER:It's the most anticipated movie of the summer - fuelled by a stream of tantalising leaks from the set - but is 'Sex and the City'showing its age?
IN THE OPENING sequence of Sex and the City, the hit HBO series, its star Carrie Bradshaw grins smugly when she sees her larger than life image pass her by on the side of a bus. Captivated, Narcissus-like, by her own photo, she fails to spot a car that sweeps by and drenches her with the filthy water from a Manhattan pothole.
This unexpected dunking was a perfect metaphor for the 96 episodes of comedy and drama that followed - an arch, brittle and sometimes poignant celebration of consumerism, hedonism and female friendship. It's also as good a metaphor as any for the unprecedented hype and fury that surrounds the opening of the Sex and the Citymovie. After all the fizz, will the film be a damp squib?
It will be for fans who are expecting the fuzzy, reheated emotion of a school reunion. The film, according to Michael Patrick King, its Irish-American writer and director - and one of the principal writers on the original series - is darker and more unsettling than the series. These are not the same cosmopolitan-swilling, date-dissecting, Marlboro-puffing thirtysomethings who shimmied around Manhattan's most fashionable spots with such brazen insouciance.
Indeed, for a summer comedy, it doesn't exactly come packaged as a frothy little bundle of laughs. As Parker points out, the film takes up at the point that she and Mr Big have been together for 10 years. The careering rollercoaster of emotions that drove 96 episodes has slowed. A derailed wedding - is there any other kind in a romantic comedy - adds some spice and drama, but the relationship, like the stars, is showing its age.
Off screen, the lives of the four characters have taken their own twists and turns. Kim Cattrall's much-publicised marriage broke up, Kristin Davis's volatile romance with Alec Baldwin fuelled a tabloid industry of its own, and Cynthia Dixon left the father of her two children for a woman she met while protesting against education funding cuts at her daughter's school.
Notwithstanding King's warning that Sex and the City: The Moviewill not be an episode of Sex and the Citystretched beyond its elastic limit, New Yorkers are beside themselves with a supercharged mix of anticipation and reservation. In cinemas all over Manhattan the trailer seems to prompt a uniform response amongst moviegoers: "This is probably the worst idea ever - but I can't wait to see it."
In a poll by the online film site AOL Moviefone, Sex and the Citybeat out other summer blockbuster releases - including the new Indiana Jones and the much-anticipated Batman sequel The Dark Knight, starring Heath Ledger - and was decreed the most exciting film event of the summer, by a third of the poll's 420,000 respondents.
It's a lot of fuss for a spot of summer froth that is essentially a codicil to a smart and sassy TV series. Fuelling the hype there has been a drip drip of leaks - accidental or otherwise - about the film by its stars and "movie insiders". The revelation by Cynthia Nixon that one of the characters dies in the film sparked a tsunami of cyber speculation. Does Charlotte meet her maker courtesy of a freak tennis accident? Or Samantha via an improbable sex toy? Is Mr Big finally crushed by the weight of his own ego? Or does Carrie die of incurable narcissism?
To the obvious question of whether anyone really cares, the answer is unequivocally yes. From Singapore to Siberia, it seems that millions of women do. And a few men too; judging by Conservative MP Michael Gove's misogynistic little bout of apoplexy in the London Times, in which he predicted that the movie would "flop like a discarded corsage into the black bin bag of history".
And the frenzy is translating into hard cash for the hordes that have piggy-backed onto the Sex and the Cityindustry. New York is the city where a small fortune was made from hawking mawkish 9/11 memorabilia. Destination on Location, a travel company that specialises in movie- and television-themed tourism, is hawking $6,000-a-day packages that promise the suckers that buy them they can "walk in the footsteps - literally - of their four favourite and fabulous characters: Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha." The Destination on Location package, with its hyper-inflated $24,000 weekend price tag, promises trips to "hot" clubs and restaurants that have long since gone off the boil, and shopping experiences and cocktail receptions that any half-witted tourist could navigate for a fraction of the price. And for New Yorkers it is Manhattan - that shimmering Petri dish of potential - that will emerge as the undisputed star of the film.
Manhattan-based fans of the series have always been aware that Sex in the Cityis, as its star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker notes, "a bit like a Jeff Koons piece". Like Koons, the creators of Sex and the Citytook a bright shiny object - Manhattan - and made it bigger, shinier and even more glamorous.
The Sex and the Citylens zoomed in on those parts of life in Manhattan that make it so uniquely exciting; the non-stop parties, openings, opportunities for reckless encounters and the importance of enduring friendships in a city where everything, even its skyline, is transient and ever-changing.
It did the same with its characters - the four archetypes selected from a swatch book of characters: Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes, the hard-nosed lawyer; Kim Cattrall as the sexually voracious PR diva Samantha Jones; and Kristin Davis as the conservative Upper East Side gallery manager. But the star of the series was undeniably Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, alternately endearing and infuriating, teetering through life on a sea of freebies, maxed-out credit cards and five-inch Manolo Blahnik heels.
In the world of hyper-celebrity, a star's iconic status is ensured when he or she is known by his first name alone: Bono, Oprah, Madonna. It's an elevated level of fame indeed when a star is recognizable by her initials only. Currently there's just one of these four in the celebrity stratosphere - Sarah Jessica Parker, or SJP as she is now referred to in the thousands of headlines, captions and chat shows and magazine covers she graces. And the show that made SJP an icon has itself achieved such iconic status that it too has been abbreviated to SATC.
By all accounts, the Marlboro-chewing, cosmo-swilling, bed-hopping freelance sex columnist that Parker portrays has precious little in common with the rather uptight, unfailingly polite married mother that she is. Parker's quasi-Victorian sensibility, her disapproval of smoking and salty talk off-screen has been well documented. One former writer on the series asked this reporter drily "Did you ever see a woman wear so many different bras to bed?" No matter how steamy things got, Carrie Bradshaw always kept her underwear on.
Despite - or because of - its phenomenon status, Sex and the Citywas pilloried from the outset for its lack of authenticity. True, there were no inconvenient families or back-stories to muddy up their Manhattan-centric lives. These women seemed to spring, fully formed, from the cashmere womb of Barneys. But for all its brittle exterior and lifestyles lived on improbably large budgets, the storylines had an undeniable ring of authenticity to them. The lives beneath the finery were real enough, with each character receiving her share of everyday ups and downs, humiliations and rejections.
Of course there have been heated debates over whether the film has passed its sell-by date - whether it reflects the post-9/11 era of xenophobia, fear and economic paralysis that has gripped America. But Manhattan, even though it took the brunt of the 9/11 attacks, has always remained somewhat inured to the trends that sweep the rest of the nation.
Economically, it not only survived but has thrived since 2001. If the 2004 era of Sex and the Citysplurging looked far-fetched, it was nothing compared to 2006, when Wall Street handed out more than $23 billion dollars in bonuses to financial grunts and chief executives. In the past year alone, Manhattan has seen the arrival of the $25,000 chocolate sundae, the $100 million apartment and the $1,000 bagel. New Yorkers are aware that looming somewhere on the horizon, like an as yet invisible iceberg, is the recession and the subprime crisis that has felled the rest of the country. But until it hits, its residents will continue to dance furiously on the decks of its own Titanic.
Of course, for the producers of Sex and the City, of which Sarah Jessica Parker is one, the more hype and fuss and controversy the better. There have also been the usual stories about on-set fights, walk offs and simmering tensions between the four women that regularly boiled over into angry stand-offs. Typical movie stuff in other words. And if as many people go to see the film to try to detect the much-hyped hostility between Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall onscreen as they do for the clothes or the storylines . . . well, box office is box office.
The initial scuppering of the project by Kim Cattrall back in 2004 has been well documented, as have the two years it took to get her back on board. Cattrall's reasons for stalling the project - a demand for more money and more control, to which the producers finally acquiesced - should have raised a post-feminist cheer. The only problem was one of the producers that resisted her demands was a woman, and her co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker. Parker has retrospectively supported Cattrall's stance: "If I had thought it was any of my business at the time," she said in an interview with New York Magazine, "what I would have said is: 'Isn't it okay for Kim to think the money isn't right?' "
For her part, Cattrall says she wasn't just holding out for more money for herself - it was also for her co-stars Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, whom she felt were also being cheated by the film's producers. Cattrall also cites a difficult personal time, the break-up of her marriage and her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis, as additional reasons for delaying the project.
The strip mining of the Sex and the Cityseam of cash hasn't just been the work of outsiders and opportunists. For women who to all intents and purposes appear to have had it made by the success of the series, both Parker and Cattrall have been assiduously on the make ever since. Both women have branded their Sex in the City personas. Cattrall delivered the poorly received television documentary Sexual Intelligence and co-wrote a book with her then husband, Mark Levinson, called Satisfaction: The Art of Female Orgasm. Parker promptly cashed in her chips as a fashion icon with a series of ads for Gap (she has since been dropped in favour of Joss Stone), launched Bitten, her own low-budget clothing line, as well as a few perfume lines, and has become the face and hair of Garnier - sporting half a dozen different hair colours whilst eulogising the ability of the mass-market cosmetics giant to keep her hair glossy and her skin wrinkle free.
In the past four years she has starred in two comedies - the execrable The Family Stonewith Diane Keaton and Failure to Launchwith Matthew McConaughey - transporting her Carrie persona to the big screen with a conspicuous lack of success. More recently, she starred in the small-budget film Smart People with Dennis Quaid, an unpleasant little film intended to bolster her acting credentials.
However, it seems that Parker suffers from the same problem as Jennifer Aniston - an inability to parlay her TV persona into something bigger and more substantial. The same is true of all the Sex and the Citycharacters; the sum is notably greater than the parts. Their on-screen chemistry is a symbiotic affair. Only Cynthia Nixon has had substantial acting success since the series ended, picking up three acclaimed Broadway roles and one Tony award.
Davis, meanwhile, has made some bit parts in TV series and a handful of television commercials. Given the trajectory of their post Sex and the Citycareers, it's a fair bet that these savvy, 21st-century women are already plotting the sequel.
Sex and the City: The Moviegoes on general release in Ireland on May 28th