Reviews by:
@federica.marchica
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Welcome to the age of the un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's and no one has affairs to remember.
It's 1998 in New York city, and there is a revolution coming up. Women are tired of being the angels of the house and of necessarily having to get married, in order to gain relevance in the US-society. They want to be free, experience things, meet people, and have sex like men.
That's what Carrie Bradshaw's column "Sex and the City" is about.
Her troubled love life, and her friends'ones are her constant source of inspiration, and show the audience that men can come and go in a woman's life, but friendship and sisterhood never go out of style.
As a teenage-girl, I spent so many hours watching this TV series with my girl-friends. We used to identify ourselves in these four feminine portraits who have become symbols of female empowerment and independence in the pop culture of the early 2000s. I was always associated with Carrie, because I was a writer. Then, there was a Miranda, a work-addict cynical lawyer, a Charlotte, a romantic artist who was tired of dating because she was waiting for Mr Right, and a Samantha, a strong, independent and ironic woman who always put her pleasure (all kinds of it!) first.
Season one starts out to be about sex, but as the viewers find out very soon, there is so much more than that. I mean, all four women have a great deal of sex though the seasons, especially Samantha, but after three seasons, it starts being more about relationships and love, than about sex. The correct title for the show would probably have been Love and the city, except for Samantha's storyline, which also included love at a certain point, as the collateral effect of the huge amount of sexual intercourses she has through the six season of the show and the two movies.
Carrie's point of view is the main one, in this story. She runs a column in a not specified newspaper, she probably writes once a week, but she's still able to afford to pay the rent of a pretty good apartment in Manhattan AND frequent shopaholic rushes at Manolo Blanhik and Jimmy Choo. How is that possible? The answer could be just one: nineties fairytale atmosphere. Speaking of fairytales, her big love interest is Mr Big (what is "big" about him is quite easy to guess), AKA John James Preston, with whom she has an on again-off again relationship lasting ten whole years before their (almost failed) marriage in the first movie. Her love #2 is Aidan Shaw, a guy who was too good, too lovable and ordinary (and too clearly in love with her) to be her endgame. He will show up in the second movie and put a question mark on Carrie's marriage with Big, who at that time was in the middle of his middle age crisis (which had probably been continuing since season 3 or so). She has a third important romance, which is the one with The City; New York.
Manhattan is stylish, glamorous and smart. People come to NYC to fall in love, says Carrie in movie #1, and in the meantime they drink fancy cocktails and buy shoes. At least, that is what she and her friends did.
Despite her love for The Big Apple, Carrie goes to Paris at the end of season 6, with a supposed-to-be charming Russian artist (what was charming about him? The accent, the money, the spoiling? It was never clear to me), but Mr Big shows up and takes her back to the USA, telling her she is the one, and she had always been. That would even be cute, if we pretend not to listen to the rumors about the revival And just like that, which report them to be in the middle of a troubled divorce.
Miranda marries the sweet bartender Steve Brady, who suffered for some time from a huge inferiority complex, due to Miranda being richer than him. They have a son and he cheats on her in movie #1, but after a while they are able to live happily ever after (hopefully!).
Charlotte marries Trey, a posh guy and a mama's boy, whom she divorces after sexual difficulties. Later on, she meets Harry Goldenblatt, creating a sort of Beauty and the Beast-like couple, but thanks to him she learns that beauty will eventually fade with age, and true love won't.
Samantha was probably the most loved character of the show, and still she was so mistreated by the writers and, as rumors say, by Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie) herself. The PR portrayed by Kim Cattrall had to face breast cancer, hair loss, orgasms loss (yes, it was a lot for her), unhappiness and dissatisfaction after a five years-long love story with Smith Jarrod, and the unnecessary excessive irony put in her storylines, which had the occasion to show the image of a strong and independent woman, but sometimes failed in doing it, conveying the image of a 40-50 year-old nymphomaniac. She won't be in the revival, due to a controversy about money with SJP, and that would certainly be a loss for the audience and the show. The change of title is not a surprise for me, since as I said, without Samantha there is no Sex and the city.
And just like that, the writers will have to fill a big gap.
The revival is due in spring 2022, and will deal with the lives of Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda in their fifties.
I, with all the nostalgic of seasons 1-6, will surely watch it, waiting for the moral, the significant and iconic sentences, the poetry that has always characterised this show, because since I have learnt that it would be on TV, I couldn't help but wonder: will the magic and the freshness of the Nineties still be there? Is there space again for fairytales when you're 50+?
Is Ever Thine, Ever Mine, Ever Ours a real thing?
In a world where everything changes so quickly, we need certainties to rely on!
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