◎ Liu Qipeng
Twenty years later, Sex and the City launched its sequel, That's It. This series once used large-scale lines and scenes, bold and avant-garde concepts of love, marriage and sex, explosively subverted the audience's heart, becoming a popular "mature female love bible", I don't know how many urban women's attitudes towards life have been affected. So much so that it came to be called the "third wave feminist period groundbreaking episode", which is not an exaggeration at all.
In the former "Sex and the City", four single but independent women in their thirties live in the metropolis of New York full of desire and temptation, and they have successful careers, although they are no longer young, they are still charming. Every day there are new men, every day there are new sexual topics, and occasional setbacks, but they are still ambitious about life and the future.
If you're looking forward to finding the same light-hearted humor in the new series as before, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. Although "Just Like This" is a sequel to "Sex and the City", it does not even continue the name of the former series, because from the appearance to the core, this is no longer an interesting and inspirational urban drama, but a story that has been lost to the extreme.
From the second episode onwards, it begins with the death of heroine Kelly's husband, Mr Big, and really opens the curtain. Yes, in this post-sex urban drama, it tells about death, about aging, about the departure of friends, but there is no new desire. The four heroines have become three, and the older single young woman, who was once in her early thirties, has now doubled in age. At this time, the life problems they face have nothing to do with desire, and they are no longer entangled in which man to marry or sleep with, but how to fight against the changes in life, continuous loss and rapid fall.
Twenty years later, the world has changed dramatically – new media, fashion trends, cities changing. Perhaps our impression of Kelly will still stay in the old girl with curly hair, wearing a puffy skirt, stepping on shiny high heels, and standing tall in the strange streets of New York, even if she is splashed with muddy water by a passing car. She once said: "Standing on high heels, I can see the real world, and what makes the feet uncomfortable is not the height of the shoes, but the desire." Whether it was the pursuit of material things or love, she used to be so calm. Of course, there are times of confusion and boredom, but she always seems to be able to find her own source of life power.
In the new episode, Kelly does not write her own column, and her new job becomes a podcast, and she must always pay attention to the growth of her Instagram and Twitter fans, and tell awkward yellow jokes to the microphone for the sake of the show's ratings. When someone she loved dies, she needs to face everything that suddenly comes on her own. Fortunately, she has two girlfriends around, but she also has her own life troubles. Miranda appears in the series bewildered by the color of her hair and asks, "Do we need to change?" "It's probably around a lot of people – the world seems to be changing at a very fast pace every day, and do we need to change? Miranda was the most sober female character in "Sex and the City", and she also had the coldest feelings about love and sex, and felt that career was her true love. In the new episodes, she quits her job and begins to find herself again, she goes to Columbia to re-study, and the alcoholism and affair do not seem to really solve her core problems. Charlotte is still the woman who strives to manage love and marriage, but her two children have grown into rebellious teenagers, and the focus of her anxiety has naturally become the problems of children and school. In the face of a series of confusion from her friends, she asked most calmly: "Is there something wrong with people who don't want to change?" ”
Once "Sex and the City", full of bold words, each episode of the heroines have a domineering spirit that is not surprising and endless. Their way of life, their freedom and calmness about life and love, let us once believe so firmly that they will always grow old coolly and sassy. But this new series seems to be a slap in the face to the first six seasons. Whether it's Kelly who says , "We'll keep the skirt we don't wear, but we'll throw away the men we don't need," or Samantha, who says , "I love you, but I love myself more, it's gone." What I saw was a tired, confused, and fragile face that had been hit by reality and abandoned by the rapid rotation of the world.
Kelly tried to step out of her comfort zone instead of curling up in the shadows of the past. She moved into a new apartment—a sunny, white house without any color—trying to find new life energy. But in the face of complex high-tech facilities, she only feels overwhelmed. For Kelly, the house, the shoes, the skirt, are all objects that connect her past. She found a futuristic house, and living in this house, she seemed so weak and hollow, and all kinds of spatial changes and contrasts were intentional by the director. She put on a white gauze dress to buy coffee, once a fashion textbook, but only attracted the side eyes of passers-by, and she wore a hat that was once foreign on the street, which also seemed so inappropriate. In the new series, the director has hardly changed the personality of the characters, and even continued Kelly's dressing style, but the tone of the whole series is no longer relaxed and pleasant, he just wants to put such an inappropriate display for people to see, at the same time, there are all kinds of embarrassment and embarrassment.
The sequel to "Sex and the City", which has been ridiculed by netizens as a "grandma fashion drama", the actors outside the drama have been constantly questioned by public opinion. The discussion of sex and love eventually became the discussion of "how old and fading women can make themselves accepted by society and the times, and how to reconcile with themselves".
The actress who played Samantha refused to appear in the sequel for some personal reasons, but she confessed on social media that she had been attacked too much on her looks. The actor who plays Kelly once said of her role in an interview: "She has too many wrinkles! How come she doesn't have any wrinkles?! It seems that people don't want us to be able to accept ourselves as we are, and we enjoy seeing us feel pain for who we are today. Whether it's our choice to age naturally and not look perfect, or the choice to make some changes that make us feel better. Fortunately, although Kelly in the play seems to have a momentary heartbeat of the young face created by the plastic surgeon, the doctor's promise of "I can make you disappear for the past fifteen years" finally dispelled Kelly's idea. This is probably the last stubbornness and persistence of the heroine.
The city of Desire, which once preached freedom of age and freedom of appearance, never seems to have shaken the concept of society. American writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong once analyzed in his own book that in the era after Sex and the City, women were not respected for this, and people may only see the world on the TV screen, the utopia that belongs only to women.
Are people who don't want to change at fault? Kelly replied to Charlotte in the play: "Some people don't have such a blessing. "I think of the fashion-like funeral that Kelly held for Mr Big at the beginning of the series, a funeral without the slightest hint of aging and death, and it was not an expression of her attitude. On the downhill road of life, in such a hasty fall, what else can she rely on to prove her former faith?
Last year, Willie Garson, Kelly's funniest boyfriend, died of cancer, and he left forever after only three episodes. In the play, he does not quit, and people who understand it should understand where the screenwriter's intention is. "Just Like This" is not over, I don't know if Kelly finally found a way to reconcile with herself, and still maintain her former heroism and pride in the face of life's ultimate problems.