‘Have ya got any loose rubies?’ … Sex and the City 2. It is clearer today that to be “crazy rich” at a time of catastrophic inequality is not a victimless crime. “Have ya got any loose rubies?” Carrie replies. “How do we tip in Abu Dhabi?” Charlotte asks as they arrive at their palatial hotel.
Remember that Sex and the City 2, in which Carrie and the girls romped through “Abu Dhabi” in designer heels and, inexplicably, turbans, was released in 2010 – a mere two years after the financial crash. Its excesses, in cinema at least, lend themselves best to the sort of scathing treatment given by The Godfather II, the greatest ever meditation on American capitalism, and American Psycho, by far the sharpest film about the crazy rich.Ĭrazy Rich Asians isn’t the first film of its type to be released by a major Hollywood studio. But unbridled wealth can’t be a leader for any worthwhile mass movement. “It’s not a movie, it’s a movement,” director Jon M Chu has said. This might appear to give the film a political edge – an interpretation encouraged by the film’s makers and promoters. The only white characters to be are given dialogue – the hotel staff at the very start of the film – expose themselves as racists. Interestingly, Crazy Rich Asians has no main white speaking parts. For the film, which has crossed the $100m mark, and has enjoyed the highest opening for a romantic comedy in three years, and is indeed funny and charming in parts, is best described as a celebration of transnational plutocracy. Perhaps Friedman’s flat-world delusion helps understand how Crazy Rich Asians can be seen as a film about Asian empowerment. Friedman declared after a trip to India that the world was becoming flat, or in other words, as rich as his own plutocratic circles – which includes Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is reported to have recently dropped $450m on a Da Vinci. In a recent op-ed, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, noted that he “really enjoyed” Crazy Rich Asians because “it reminded me of an important point: Rich Asia has gotten really rich”. Even the pet dogs are called Astor and Rockefeller. But many more vignettes of ostentatious acquisition and wealth follow. We never see nor hear from Young’s husband, whose sole function seems to be the revenge purchasing of hotels, again. An enraged Young, played by Michelle Yeoh, makes one phone call to her husband, who buys the hotel – an act that has been hailed as Asian empowerment. “Let China sleep,” the film quotes the great Frenchman saying, “for when she awakens she will shake the world.” An opulent London hotel refuses to honour Singaporean matriarch Eleanor Young’s reservation, as her children slump across their LV suitcases, suggesting perhaps she might be happier somewhere in Chinatown. C razy Rich Asians opens with Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis Vuitton.
0 kommentar(er)
