Hasta La Ideas

Rikard Spirit (Max Ryan), the architect who seduces Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) in Sex and the City 2

Perhaps you’ve heard about a little film bounding into theaters nationwide today. It’s about a quartet of improbably diverse gal pals who live in New York and never wear the same outfit twice. Earlier this week, we donned some vintage Thierry Mugler and our most vertiginous heels for a preview screening of Sex and the City 2 (or, if you’re in Finland, Sinkkuelämää 2) and discovered a few tenuous links to the world of design. We’ll leave you to make up your own mind on the madcap costumes dreamed up by Patricia Field and her team, whose appetite for outsized, glitter-encrusted accessories and ’80s jewel tones knows no bounds, but we think SATC2 is worth seeing for the Tim Gunn cameo alone. In delivering his lone line, Gunn demonstrates the best comic timing in the film. We smell a supporting actor nomination.

But here’s the real SATC2 talking point to pull out at the Memorial Day barbecue: when the girls find themselves in Abu Dhabi on a press junket, Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), who the sequel finds fending off menopause with the help of Suzanne Somers and fistfuls of synthetic hormones, is seduced by none other than a raffish architect! A dashing, grizzled-a-la-Richard-Branson figure roars up out of nowhere in the back of a jeep, dazzles the women, and then disappears over the dunes (which writer/director Michael Patrick King told us are the very same dunes that appeared in Lawrence of Arabia). He’s revealed to be one Rikard Spirit (Max Ryan), “a Danish architect” staying at the same hotel as the ladies. The film, which we found maddeningly short on exterior shots, doesn’t say any more about Spirit’s work, but a crude pun, sexual hijinks, and a plot-pivoting scuffle with the Abu Dhabi authorities all come courtesy of the architect, a design-minded deus ex machina.

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