More ‘Sex’ for the City?

Desperate fans snapped photos of the empty directors’ chairs. “Can I sit down?” a tourist from Italy pleaded. “Just for a moment—a picture for my friends.” A publicist obliged. Teetering on enormously high heels while looking way too glam for daytime were Samantha (Kim Cattrall, in a red gown with plunging décolletage), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon, in a slim royal-blue sheath), Charlotte (Kristin Davis, architectural black) and finally Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker in a poufy, off-white confection by Vivienne Westwood).

When Sex and the City, the movie, began shooting in New York this fall, the sight of its stars was both commonplace and traffic-stopping. (Gawker.com cattily called it “The Most Important Movie Ever Filmed in New York.”)

A warning to anyone who has not obsessively followed coverage of the film. There may be spoilers ahead. Despite the nearly constant presence of cameras and the obvious visual cues (Parker’s wedding dress; Davis in a pregnancy belly), the filmmakers have taken pains to mask the plot from ravenous fans.

“They really aren’t hearing the dialogue,” Michael Patrick King, screenwriter and director, said. “They don’t know how the characters interact.”

When last we left our heroines, they seemed ready to put toxic bachelors and randy Manhattan nights behind them.

“That sort of wanton lust, it’s just not at the surface of their skin anymore,” Parker said. “What’s important to me is that Carrie’s making a serious attempt at making grown-up decisions about love and life choices.”

The characters’ ageing will also determine the way they interact with the city because “32-year-olds go out and get drunk and sleep with inappropriate men in bars downtown,” King said. “And 42-year-old girls maybe don’t. In the series we chased the minutiae of being single, the turn of a rejection phrase. The movie has those details, but they’re not as obsessive. When you’re four single girls sitting around a coffee shop, you have the luxury of time, and when you’re a little bit more grown up, it’s a luxury just to talk.”

There’s also the way the gals look: Parker began fittings in August for her 80 or so costume changes. “We would get clothes for, like, four hours, and then there would be someone from Yves Saint Laurent standing there and stripping me of them and taking them back,” Parker said.

Parker is a hands-on producer (“I like that I feel responsible for people,” she said), but she also is actressy enough that she doesn’t watch dailies, though she did make sure there were softening filters on the camera lenses. (Wrinkles here are scarce, in real life and on screen.)

A Sex and the City movie was in the works immediately after the series ended but was scuttled when Cattrall wouldn’t agree to appear. “What was scary about doing a movie is that we left on such a high note,” she said, “If we were going to go back into it, money was definitely a factor.”

As a lauded theatre actress, did Cynthia Nixon even miss playing Miranda? “I did miss her,” she said. “I missed the fictional people. I missed the real people. I missed the day-to-day of shooting the series.”

Back at the hotel Parker was circumspect about the attention. “I really try to not think too much about what will people think—you know, are the homosexuals going to gag? Are the women going to be disappointed because it’s just a very complicated way of working.”

In the end the film’s success will depend on much the same thing as the TV show’s: the women and the city.

“For me the whole movie is the streets,” Parker said. “That’s the romance. That’s the hope. That’s where single women walk out the door every day, and they just don’t know what is two steps away.”

-Melena Ryzik (NYT)