Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis reprise their roles as television's fabulous foursome in Michael Parick King's "Sex And The City". A capper to the popular series as charming as it is unnecessary, only the sterling cast is winning; King, an executive producer on the series, offers up a flaccid translation from the small to the silver screen.  The movie feels like four back-to-back episodes rather than a single story. Lulls cramp the pace, tonal shifts are jagged, and some of the funnier lines—nearly all of them Cattrall's—come off as party crashers.

Worst of all, the funniest moment in the movie is actually supposed to be the most wrenching: left at the altar, Carrie nearly drops in a dead faint, King cutting southward to show her frilly pink cell phone slip out of her hand in slow-mo, crashing to the floor... just like all her hopes and dreams! There won't be a dry eye in the house, though not for the reason King might've thought.

Sex And The City, more than being a show about self-empowered women in the big city, a whipsmart field guide to the new sexual mores, and a post-feminist recalibration of gender roles, has always embodied the pert phrase Carrie offers up early in the movie: women, she tells us, come to New York in search of “love and labels”.  Inevitably, the film is heavy on both, maybe tilted slightly toward the latter. Some of the cast, most notably Parker, became flash-bulb and red-carpet avatars of Fifth Avenue luxury, the darlings of the Conde Nast set, and the film is glazed with a self-congratulatory patina of product placements. Probably fifty or sixty percent of the film's shots include at least one brand name product somewhere in the frame. Manolo Blahnik shoes and a Louis Vuitton bag actually figure into the plot. 

This isn't too off-putting, considering fashion has always been the fifth star.  Besides, they live up to the look.  Parker's showcase scene as a bride in a Vogue photoshoot more than confirms she's got the moxy to live up to the brands she loves. In another scene, in which she models a medley of 80s fashions for her pals, she looks ready to curate a fashion museum right out of her own palatial closet.  Fashion fakers they're not.

The closet scene is a witty example of how the movie candidly riffs on the touchy subject of age. That the ladies of SATC are in their 40s is flatly declared. (Before the end of the movie Samantha crosses the threshold of 50.) Life's giving them one more cocktail before closing time, and they know it. Parker first came to fame in the Eighties, of course, so there's a sly wink to the audience as she parades her ghastly selection of Reaganite outfits to the thumping beat of vintage Run DMC. The journey’s been long, but she’s as fabulous as ever, even if at times she’s sort of intensely beautiful, showing off a sinewy frame of glazed muscle, all popping veins and rock-hard bulges.  She looks like a drill instructor from a futuristic totalitarian state ruled by Joan Rivers.

Still, glamour or not, the cast looks fantastic and genuinely gives meaning to the phrase “40 is the new 30”.  Such joys as there are in “Sex And The City” come from the honesty, together with a welcome lack of maudlin hand-wringing, with which King portrays women whose verve and vivacity unfortunately can’t slow the passage of time. They have fun with it. One of the funniest jokes is Carrie asking for a phone to call Mr. Big.  Her assistant tosses her an iPhone, at which she stares blankly before tossing it back. “I don't know how to work one of these things!” The ladies’ appeal has never consisted of their allegedly sophisticated urban sexiness, but in something more fundamental, accessible to any viewer and for that matter any viewer of either gender—the women of "Sex And The City" always act endearingly human wrapped up in their brand-name beauty.

Jokes aside, Carrie would roll her eyes at the notion of passing her prime, anyway, convinced as she is that the new self-determined woman, liberated from the old patriarchy and far enough removed from the early feminist battlegrounds, has the power to make up her own rules. The early Yeah, right! chuckle, that Carrie will be married in a label-less wedding dress, slowly transforms into a fitting symbol of the modern woman: free of all labels, ready to be a material girl—or not—just as she damn well pleases.

And in this dissolution of rules and labels lies the fascinating heart of the “Sex And The City” movie: the movie’s vision of the world, steeped in glitz and glamour, short-circuits into a dizzying, through-the-looking-glass realm in which everything and everyone is thrown into a state of full exchangeability. All that is solid melts into air.

Time is money, literally, when Miranda, sitting in a taxi, tells Carrie she's been at the curb waiting “for about seventeen dollars”. Samantha makes herself into a giant slab of homemade sushi. Carrie tells us lovers are like brand-name products: there's the genuine article and then their are the knockoffs (though oddly she doesn't mind Big's plagiarism). The actor Smith Jerrod is both Samantha’s lover and her job. Louise, Carrie's assistant, is punningly made by her boss into a city/saint (“Saint Louise”) and a brand name (“Louise Vuitton”). 

Even the minor jokes contribute, as when Miranda describes Steve pretending to be a dolphin (“It's not so much an impression as Steve-as-dolphin”). Most remarkable of all is the fate of love itself: Louise actually declares its reification, telling Carrie “Love is the thing”, before producing a keychain tchotchke emblazoned with “Love” in solid gold letters. At the end of the film Carrie makes love into a metaphorical garment, rhapsodizing that all New York ladies are “dressed in love”.

The exchanges point to something less like free play and more like an eerie psychopathology, as if Carrie’s New York City is really a surrealist projection of her ontological confusion. The world of objects, pretty but unsolid, shimmers like a mirage. Consequences for her actions are absent—as is, revealingly, all mention of money, a species of mystification amounting to hypercapitalist magical realism. Money, where it's mentioned, is irrelevant, almost a joke. After talking up the prohibitive cost of a penthouse apartment, Big buys it for her anyway. A honeymoon becomes a group vacation. The normally fixed monetary value of a handbag is instantly effaced when it is revealed as rented.

On the other hand, all sales are not final: Samantha is outbid in an auction for a fine piece of jewelry, only to find that her lover has bought it for her secretly, and Carrie sells her apartment to move in with Big and, when that falls through, she buys it right back.  Not just money, but time is pliant, too.  When Miranda and Steve visit a therapist to fix their marriage, the plan of action calls for willed amnesia: if both parties show up at a designated meeting time on the Brooklyn Bridge, she says, it means the past is instantly wiped out and their relationship starts over. This proves true, as it does for Carrie and Big in a similar way. Lucky Louise merely needs a warm smile from her ex-lover, Will, to erase their troubled past.  Transfer even links older to younger people, the film’s culminating shots craning over a New York street picking out twentysomething quartets—implying an infinite chain of incubating SATC girls—conjuring a weird carnival atmosphere of consumer exchange unlimited in any and all directions, including temporal.

As each of the women struggles through this disorienting slipstream of omnidirectional exchange, the only grounding presence is the group of women. “Sex And The City” is, above all, a paean to friendship, and many of the scenes, on the surface, are little more than glowing tributes to the ways in which the ladies’ sisterhood sustains and inspires them. The murky New Year’s loneliness of Miranda and Carrie is touchingly and comically bridged by a late-night cab ride downtown. The film, like the series before it, paints a moving portrait of friendship through thick and thin. But their need for friendship is, at the same time, the starkest symptom of their collective illness. 

For the movie’s central exchange transaction is between guilt and forgiveness. Carrie and Miranda suffer crushing break-ups made complicated by the obviously sincere penitence of their lovers. Their forgiveness of their lovers—and, soon enough, the need to forgive each other—involves an intense negotiation between Carrie and Miranda. Their parallel situations come to a head in an argument in which, as if haggling over the price of a pair of Jimmy Choos, they must agree on the equivalency of their romantic problems, figuratively swapping Steve and Big. Miranda must put Steve in Big's place; Carrie must put herself in Big's place; Samantha openly formulates an equation for her plight, counting the number of years her boy toy lived for her and vice versa; and poor Charlotte has her breakthrough from an accidental exchange in which she thinks she's in the shower at home and swallows the dreaded Mexican water.

Nor is Big immune, and his case is particularly interesting because it involves the use of sight. With feet so cold they could shatter, Big sits in his towncar outside the wedding “chapel” (actually the New York Public Library, another identity swap), unable to go through with the wedding. As Carrie's limo pulls up, he begs her to turn around. “Let me see you,” he pleads from inside the car.  Though his doubts took root earlier, Big’s anxiety is tied directly to his vision: what he sees in that one moment will determine his choice. Sight comes up again later with Samantha's return from Los Angeles. Attempting to resist one temptation, sex, by overindulging in another, food, she scandalizes the Manhattan set with a bulging gut. When her pals give her the straight dope on her waistline, Samantha explains that she'd gotten rid of her mirrors.

To which Carrie responds with the film's ultimate summation of what friendship really is: “We're your mirrors”. She's right. The men and women in “Sex And The City” suffer from figurative blindness, almost a mild form of insanity. Mystified by the incoherent swirl of value exchanges around them, friendship, in the end, is the only way of figuring out the proper price of things. The movie is two hours of these poor creatures, men and women alike, groping around in the dark, relying on good pals to reflect them back to themselves.  Friendship appears at once noble and pathetic in this film, adding a perverse kind of warmth to this fairy tale of capitalist enchantment.