SEX AND THE CITY

The Manhattanites' big-screen outing is witless, reactionary tripe, writes Donald Clarke

IN ANTICIPATION of the inevitable letters of complaint, let me first acknowledge that I am, in several senses, not The Right Sort of Person to review Sex and the City.

I am not the sort of person who believes that feminists fought gender wars purely to enable their successors to wallow in guiltless, lobotomised materialism. Unlike Ms Carrie Bradshaw, Ms Ally McBeal and Ms Bridget Jones, I am not the sort of person who thinks that women must have a man - and a man they might marry, at that - in their lives to achieve proper fulfilment.

I am, moreover, not the sort of person who can listen to Kim Cattrall's bizarre impression of Leslie Phillips in a 1950s sex comedy without feeling faintly nauseous. Why on EARTH, does she TALK like that? The erratic stresses and sleepy, purring timbres are, one imagines, intended to put across her pathological eagerness for sexual congress, but, to me, they suggest a woman with a serious brain disorder.

Stacey D'Erasmo - a distinguished novelist and proud Wrong Sort of Person - put it best in a much- quoted article from the New York Times Magazine. "These characters really do just want to get married; they just don't want to look quite so naive about it," she wrote. "The new single girl . . . embodies in her very slender form the argument that not only is feminism over. It also failed: look how unhappy the 'liberated' woman is!"

None of which is of any great significance. When a TV series moves beyond its niche and totters into the cinema, it must expect to endure analysis from every class of pundit. The distributors of Sex and the Citywere not keen on showing the film to critics - The Irish Timeswas forced to view it at a regular commercial screening - but eventually men, women, fans, opponents and the unconcerned will get to express an opinion. Here's mine: the movie is witless, reactionary tripe.

In this writer's defence, he has set himself a formidable task. The film takes just enough incident to fill a television episode and seeks to stretch it across a picture that is (no joke) seven minutes longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We should not, I suppose, give too much away, but it hardly needs to be said that the romantic equilibrium established at the close of the series does not last long. The serious one with the red hair (Cynthia Nixon) is living in Brooklyn with a sat-upon nerd. The anal one with the deranged grin (Kristin Davis) is cuddling up to her bald Jewish husband. The promiscuous one with the speech impediment (Cattrall) is chasing some unfortunate youth around LA. And the thoughtful one who dresses like a blind drag queen (Sarah Jessica Parker) is planning to marry the peculiarly named Mr Big (Chris Noth).

Within the film's first three hours, two of those relationships will dissolve. For the remaining six hours, the characters observe a holding pattern - they weep, talk, shop and booze - over a happy ending that is as inevitable as it is trite.

It is in the nature of movies inspired by TV series to crowbar in all the things we (hem, hem) loved from the source material. Accordingly, the film-makers grab every opportunity to have the four lead characters sashay down the street in a military rank. Cattrall makes a bonfire of any residual dignity as she ogles a well-endowed neighbour. And, despite the fact that every minute of every day is spent gossiping with her idiotic chums, Nixon continues to brag about the busyness of her job and the pressures that result from raising a young child. None of this activity ever coalesces into anything remotely like a plot.

All this might have been bearable if any signs remained of the sophistication that is rumoured to have enlivened the early scripts. Leslie Philips might have delivered his own lascivious lines in a similar fashion to Cattrall, but even that old rogue would have balked at the fruity puns she is asked to deliver. "Must go. Something has just COME UP," she says upon spying a swelling crotch. Elsewhere, Davies is asked to do a diarrhoea joke straight out of the Rob Schneider Book of Yucks. You would find greater levels of sophistication at a cockfight (Ooo, cockfight!).

What are we to make of a film that, panicked at its lack of African- American characters, hires Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson to fetch and carry as the lead's personal assistant? "Ah, a white man with a baby," Nixon remarks approvingly while visiting a Manhattan locale that had, to this point, seemed worryingly ethnic. Let's not start on the fact that the only unattractive women in the film are the anti-fur protestors who throw paint over Cattrall's vile white coat. Back to the cave, you hairy-oxtered liberals!

Yet it must be grudgingly acknowledged that the Sex and the Citymovie will serve perfectly well as a devotional tool for dutiful believers.

Here it is: a vulgar four-headed totem, before which The Right Sort of People can obediently kowtow. Count me out.