the perfection of fruits grown under glass

“ Everyone has Samantha, or had her at some point; so she would like us to believe, and this is where the film of “Sex and the City” begins to part company with the original. The TV show was smart enough to trade on both the sentimentality and the shockability of its viewers, encouraging them to sigh at romantic satisfaction and, at the same time, to snicker at the dirty talk that gave it spice. Behind it all, one caught a whiff of stale Puritanism: despite the women’s knowing bid for urbanity, there was an old-school, anti-sophisticated wish to put desire in its proper place, or, better still, to disperse it in a shared public giggle, for fear of where it might lead. Now the whiff has become a blast, and Samantha’s efforts to signal her appeal, which might have seemed languorous on the small screen, are blown up here into an embarrassing semaphore: thudding closeups of her slurping through a cocktail straw or swallowing a mouthful of guacamole. No self-respecting maker of soft erotica would countenance such shots, and, as for the matching dialogue (“Something just came up,” Samantha murmurs over the phone, as her boyfriend stands beside her in bulging briefs), it sounds like a flaccid aside from 007. ”