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AT the
end, there was a rousing applause. It was not a
premiere; in fact, the film was well into its third day.
But the applause was ringing and it was coming from an
audience visibly impressed and, more than that, touched
to the core. Sex and the City, the recipient of
many Emmy Awards, has gone from being a TV series to the
celluloid screen. With the transfer came a shift in both
geography and morality. In television, in a format that
allows the story to go on and on, with the characters
open to take routes and paths for surprise and shock,
there was not much to judge and dislike. The stories
thrived on built-in ellipses, the greatest ellipse, of
course, found in the title itself.
The
series was and is not really about sex. True, there were
sex scenes and lust more than attraction appeared to be
the glue that allowed the characters to stick to their
attractiveness. As one went into the stories, however,
they were more cautionary tales about kinship and
relationships. Believe me, Sex and the City
should have carried the title Love in the City, but who
would watch a show with that title?
Look
again. You don’t have to count Charlotte York,
concededly the most “conservative” of the group, to
realize that all the women in the TV series are after
real love and that obnoxious concept called marital
stability. They go through a rigmarole of entanglement
and disentanglement only to come out of it aching for
explanations as if they are talking to a jury. Indeed,
in the episodes, one feels that the characters are
always dealing with a normative mirror. Contrary to the
celebrated recklessness—in the period when to be liberal
was regarded a good thing, recklessness could be seen as
liberation—of Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Miranda
Hobbes and Charlotte York are really mainstream aching
for love and permanent relations or, at the least,
semipermanent solutions to the internal bickering they
verbalize for us each week.
Each
week, we suspend our judgment because the series
indicates that there is more on the road for our
characters. Who knows? They may change their aims and
personal mission. Who knows? The right person may come
and our view of these women may eventually undergo
restructuring. The suspense inherent in the series is
founded on the unfinished business of these characters
and all the other collateral personalities that populate
their frames.
Now that
it is a film, Sex and the City has to contend
with what Frank Kermode called a “sense of ending,” the
principle that somehow something should have an end. We
do not have an end in the series even if it’s
discontinued but we have in films that closure called
The End.
Perhaps,
it is this nature of having a “The End” at the end that
I wonder what the applause was all about. For a series
that was wonderfully successful in avoiding guilt and
offering us a guilt-free diet of dreams and desires, the
film finally relents and takes the central path to
stories demanding solutions and resolutions.
The
character of Mr. Big loses its rich mystique and
full-blown chauvinism. The story soon makes him the
Prince Charming and much as we want to believe, we know
that to do otherwise is more real. Are we going to allow
our intelligent Carrie Bradshaw to give in to the rules
of society? Are intelligence and independence curses
that can be dissipated by the power of men? Is there
power in the love of men that can cure all illnesses
like loneliness and aloneness? These questions are easy
to answer in the series that is an open season for all
possibilities. The film, bigger in scope, proves to be a
tiny arena for our women. Their worlds become smaller,
their flaws magnified in a domain that is used to seeing
women tamed.
The
ending is a judgment of the scriptwriter. The applause
is also the judgment of the audience who can only be
entertained so much but cannot really take women who are
so fiercely independent they can rule their own world or
foist their own universe of moral codes upon us. In a
great whole sense, the film makes safe a narrative that
was, week after week, enthralling us by way of a series
that courted danger because the roads taken by the lead
characters were those that were really being taken by
women in urban places.
Perhaps,
the audience was applauding the wanton production
elements where Blahniks and Louis Vuittons and high
fashion seem accessible and affordable. You recall those
films, where the impossible takes place: the ugly
princess takes a handsome prince and happily lives
after; the poor secretary gets the job and secures a
most expensive bag; the writer achieves a dream to have
the biggest walk-in closet in the world; and a woman in
her 50s is empowered enough to dump a stud because she
loves herself more and has to settle that personal
issue. There are more of these entertaining trivia about
women and, I believe, they are stunning enough unto
themselves.
I
remember one film I watched: Three Coins in the
Fountain. The film was lovely, the actresses
beautiful, the premise about coins and wishes endearing.
Everyone looked beautiful in that film. It was also
touching in the inane way. Perhaps, if that film were
shown today, applause would be heard, too, in the
moviehouse. Such is the force of films. We convict
ourselves with the things that we like.
The film
stars the quartet of Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall,
Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon reprising their TV
roles. Chris Noth retains his grip on Mr. Big. Michael
Patrick King is the writer and director. Sarah Jessica
Parker coproduces the film with King, John Melfi and
Darren Star, the acknowledged creator of the series
based in part on Candace Bushnell’s novel with the same
title.
The TV
series has
New York
as the other main character. The film goes out of the US
and into Mexico, commenting in the process on the
sanitation of the country. It’s a wonder the Mexicans
did not raise a global protest on the insinuation that
ingesting Mexican water can cause diarrhea. Only we
Filipinos are mighty sensitive about such footnotes, I
think. |
