June 26, 2008

Sex and the City, the Movie


What struck me most was Samantha’s confession to Smith that she loves him but she loves herself more. This was after her disillusionment with the domestic life she had with “the one”. It grabbed me in its bold difference from the rest of Samantha’s friends’ dreams. She wanted to be with herself more than with the one she loves. This is honesty rarely heard of in my part of the globe. Indeed this is often considered selfish, foolish, and ‘whorish’ of her if she had been Asian. Yet I feel many women feel this way about their relationships. Even when they have the one perfect person, the life they shape with one another takes away from who they are. For majority of women I know, marriage IS shedding who you are. It is living for another forever. And if one loses oneself in the process this is considered a ‘necessary sacrifice’. No wonder so many married women grow bitter, insecure and judgmental towards others during the course of their married life. Somewhere in the back of their minds they remember what life was before the “sacrifice” yet are too ashamed to claim some of that life back.

Too often women had to see how marriage almost never changes anything for the husband, while it completely overturns the world of the wife. Indeed why should the husband go home immediately after work to a house he has been living in for twenty, thirty years? The furniture and spaces surely have not changed. Keeping house is almost automatically the responsibility of the wife. Except for the occasional chores, or during social functions or to watch the game, or indeed when there is an appointment with the wife in bed, what else is there in the house that needed getting home early to?

“I changed who I was for you”, said an angry Miranda to Steve. In order for them to get back together she had to forgive herself and her husband for that. I think this message makes the movie. It doesn’t pretend to predict a ‘happy ever after’ for the girls. It only provides glimpses of happiness from the choices that they make.

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