Storming the desert in Manolos, the fab four escape recession-chic

Sex and the City is such a tightly wound formula that it’s really hard to go wrong when another movie is trotted out: Michael Patrick King’s zingy comeback lines and Patricia Field’s over-the-top costuming plus four women whose personalities have been so clearly delineated over six seasons that we know exactly what to expect from them whether they’re thrown in a barn or left inside Barneys. So this time, they go to Abu Dhabi. Four American women with a New York sense of entitlement get shipped out to a ridiculously wealthy Middle Eastern nation with repressive religious codes. It’s a desert porn comedy of manners, but before we board our private First Class cabin on Emirates, we have to drop by a big fat gay wedding.

Stanley Blatch, Carrie’s GBF, finally gets hitched in his dream wedding presided over by a surprisingly alive and agile Liza Minnelli. “When there’s this much gay energy,” Miranda quips, “Liza Minnelli manifests.” Here, the themes of the film are set up: the rules of marriage and what can be broken, the increasingly non-traditional roles of men and women, betrayal, and aging disgracefully. None of this pushes new ground, and Carrie, who is married and in her late 40s, still acts like a self-obsessed bratty ingenue clinging to her gal-about-town image. She cringes at the thought of take-out dinners and watching TV on the couch, and it’s much less endearing than it used to be.

And yet, we grant the four women that. They have arrived, each in their own way, and have come back again, still sexy, smart and perennially overdressed. A brief flashback to the ’80s when the girls first meet reveals an off-shoulder sweatshirt and sneakers-wearing Carrie, a studiously prim and collegiate Charlotte, Miranda in a frumpy suit and high-tops, and Samantha, a very punky Lower East Side bartender in leather pants and a denim vest. By the mid 2000s they have conquered the city in Manolos and collectively slept with half the male population of Manhattan.

But SATC2 happens in the midst of an economic downturn, and the phrase “waste of money” is actually uttered by Carrie, who previously had no compunction about blowing her rent money on a pair of shoes. Even her outfits are often understated — she first appears in a simple white jersey dress devoid of embellishment or projectile flowers, one of the several monochromatic numbers she wears from Halston, the label which Sarah Jessica Parker now heads as chief creative officer. So instead of slumming it around the sales bin, Samantha manages to score a sort of press junket to Abu Dhabi, “the new Middle East,” touted as a playground for the über rich and a progressive city where Westerners can feel comfortable. Charlotte leaves her children and husband to the hands of a buxom young nanny, Miranda leaves her sexist boss, and Carrie leaves her Big for a week in the desert.

The girls’ wardrobe appropriately transforms to woman-in-the-dunes glam, with caftans, harem pants, turbans and long billowy skirts in bright colors that spice up the turmeric-and-cumin landscape, still provocatively flaunting flesh amid women fully sheathed in black. The guided tour of the airplane and the seven-star hotel gives you the feeling this movie was backed by Arabic dime, but the film’s ending is a less than glowing appraisal of Arab customs — in fact there’s a mildly harrowing (but still quite funny) scene where the menopausing Samantha looks like she’s about to get stoned by a throng of angry keffiyeh-covered men — not Brooklyn hipsters — who have witnessed her hot-flashing around the souk.

Yes, people will call this movie anti-Muslim for its one-dimensional portrayal of the culture, but it’s still true that the United Arab Emirates possess a grave record of human rights abuses and that women are still discriminated against, which makes all its high tech luxury and oil-based opulence really just the equivalent of “sparkle.” Wanna-PC folks might even take offense with the scene where the Islamic women disrobe to reveal the latest Western couture underneath, but this might truly be the case for many of them, and why not? It would be condescending to think Islamic women don’t get tired of wearing the same thing every day, or wouldn’t think of matching a Birkin with their burqa.

Samantha’s lewd behavior on hotel property gets her arrested (while nothing seems to happen to the Danish architect she was snogging). Now if Samantha had actually boned a sheik or even one of the butlers, that would’ve been a more transgressive turn of events, but probably too geopolitically complicated for what has turned out to be the fluffy feel-good end of a franchise. The fab four is forced to leave the country in a huff and made to face what they needed to face: their fears of just not being “woman” enough, whether as a childless wife, an overwhelmed mother, a partner in a male-dominated law firm, or a 52-year-old single lady losing her hormones. Back in the safety and freedom of the giant walk-in closet that is New York City, they figure themselves out again, and the power of “I am womanism” is affirmed. Roar.

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Sex and the City 2 opens in cinemas on June 2.