Sex and the City

Romantic comedies are fucking metal. People hate romantic comedies not, as they usually claim, because they're pat and Pollyannaish depictions of the complexities of modern relationships, but because they're chillingly accurate.

The formula, as typified here, is this: Girl chases boy, boy gets scared and usually cheats, girl feels rejected, girl goes to what appears to be an Applebee's in Ixtapa with her other girls, someone shits herself, girl acquires a preternaturally wise black fairy god-sista figure (the hottest and only non-white girl in the movie, played with unleaded oomph by Jennifer Hudson), boy writes terse apology, they get married. Variations on this theme do exist, but across the board, the genre is didactic: True love comes to those who learn the selfless virtues of honesty, empathy and looking affluent on a factotum's wages.

Those who claim to hate romcoms cite the cleanliness and linearity of these love stories as deceptive and callow, and this is where Sex and the City shines as both a series and a movie. Carrie and friends aren't merely lovelorn but plain horny and often promiscuous; they experiment with lesbianism, are openly insecure about their appearances and confess that something changes when you're the "up-the-butt girl." Claim relationships aren't that simple and you're probably too deeply engaged in yours with Jacques Lacan. I ask my fellow feminists who find it tiresome to watch girls get so giddy about clothes, image and relationships: What, at the end of the day, is The L Word about? To those who decry the Sex girls as mercenary sluts, I retort that their social lives are as messy and tawdry as those of any other single urbanoid, if amplified by inexplicably epic amounts of money to fling around. Would you perhaps prefer June Cleaver?

What's most fun and refreshing about Sex and the City is that it presents not just two but a whopping four potential lifestyle choices for educated white women. It's no longer Madonna/whore, but materfamilias Smith girl/ plucky vaguely Jewish maven of letters/ formidable professional gorgon/ whore. What an age we live in! Sex and the City's genius as a movie is that it attempts to conclude a rumination on the meaning of romantic relationships when they're freed from the traditional court/sex/cohabitate /wed/spawn narrative. When a woman is not only permitted but encouraged to screw for pleasure's sake, has her own money (though we have no idea how these earn it) and isn't entirely certain whether she does want children and domesticity, what's to say that the traditional romcom resolution still applies? Why love at all if it's not to clinch a ring? Why, Carrie wonders, pursue "happily ever after" when you're perfectly happy?

Yet on one level the film seems to conceal a cruel message for those who aren't. The one female character that's implied to do anything at all but shop and pine after dick, babies or a big baroque wedding dress finds herself in a predictable fix. Career-girl Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) — very Clinton au courant with her perpetually wounded cookie-face and pantsuits — is an increasingly frigid scold who hasn't put out for rumpled cutie-pie husband Steve (David Eigenberg) in six months. She's too tired, work, house, kids, etc. He cheats once and lornly tells all, she freaks out and it's the crux of her subplot. She's the fuddy old schoolmarm who bears the brunt of her gushy girlfriends' teasing; a too-intellectual martinet with pubic sideburns, whose ills are only resolved when she gets the hottest sex scene in the movie. Surprise! But she distils the self-conscious and smug reflection of the show and movie both in one line: "The only two choices for women are witch and sexy kitten?" Beware of not putting out, ladies.

Male fear of and frustration with females who look beyond them for fulfillment form the subtext of Carrie's conclusion, too. The rest of the drama is that of the ticking clock for forty-something Carrie, who enters into a rather anti-climactic engagement with her inexplicably beloved Mr. Big. Though she doesn't quite approach bridezilla status, she hurls herself into wedding prep as only those who mark the advent of spring by the beginning of Fashion Week can do. Big, the jerk, jilts her as a result — incoherently pleading that it's all too very public — and she flees down Mexico way for girl time. Once back she faces singledom as summed up in an empty apartment, a New Year's Eve slept through, and a Valentine's Day being mistaken — horrors! — for a lesbian. Like the rest of the cast, Carrie doesn't so much evolve as protest too much, change her hair color, see the selfish error of her ways and say, "Ah, fuck it."

"Spare me a week of soul-searching," her wonderfully icy editor Enid Frick (Candace Bergen) intones early in the movie. And Carrie's "happily ever after" comes when she does just that. Indeed, the blithest Sex characters seem to be the most transparently simple, those like Steve, Charlotte and the still-libertine Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who want what they want and go for it with a minimum of estrogenic dithering. At the end of the movie we like Samantha — now fifty, still gorgeous and fine with the fact that she plain doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend — best of all. Is life so simple? Spare yourself and enjoy it, says Sex, preferably in a truly hideous dress.