Tomorrow Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s latest film starring Margot Robbie as the iconic (and stereotypically perfect) Mattel doll . I know you are not in your skin anymore, I was the same way until recently. And I will tell you, without spoilers, what to expect!

Barbie:review of the ’ Greta Gerwig’s latest film

Visti Lady Bird (2017) e Little Women (2019), certainly upon entering the theater one could not expect a banal live action of the animated films starring Barbie. Yet the film manages to surprise in a thousand different ways.

Not so much for Margot Robbie’s performance:flawless. Especially when you consider that acting is not just repeating a series of lines by heart. It is mimicry, it is movements. It is getting the viewer to not only empathize with the character, but inside the story. And in this, Robbie and Ryan Gosling (Ken) did not disappoint expectations.

Barbie is an exciting film in many ways. The political and social issues brought to the screen by Gerwig are many and definitely challenging. Yet they are approached with such lightness that they take one’s breath away. It is a thought-provoking film and, without even realizing it, while you are laughing out loud you can feel a tear rolling down your face.

Agony Is this the story of Margot Robbie’s Barbie?

Over the narrator’s voice of Ada Maria Serra Zanetti, voice actress of Helen Mirren (from whom we are indescribably sorry not to hear the prologue this go-round) we enter a completely pink world. Everyone is always smiling and every day is perfect. Until the idyll is broken.

Have you ever thought about dying? A “simple”sentence that precedes a series of unfortunate events that lead Barbie to have to make a choice:high heels or a pair of Arizona Birkenstocks?

The former glittery and strictly pink, the latter unsightly and brown to boot. An ordinary woman would probably opt for comfort, but what will be Barbie’s choice?

What is told in Gerwig’s film is not simply the story of the stereotypical Barbie who finds her heels on the floor and is thus forced to go to the Real World to find herself.

It is the story of Barbie. Of the last sixty-five years. Of all of Mattel’s Barbies. And of a thin thread between Barbie Land and the Real World. And it is also a bit, for once, the story of Ken.

Tributes to great Oscar-winning cinema inside Barbie

The list of feature films from which Gerwig was inspired for this film is very long (33 to be exact) and there are several statuette references within Barbie-the director herself has said during some interviews that she is grateful to great Hollywood directors, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Weir, for supporting her throughout the project. Inspired first, given advice second, for the realization and rendering of certain scenic and technical aspects on the set.

But the really impressive homage is the one that opens the film:to Kubrick’s cinema. Specifically to the scene in 2001 –a space odyssey (1968) in which the monkey starts hitting the remains of other animals with bone. Thus the animal reacts to the change as soon as it begins to be conscious of its transition into man. Similarly, faced with the manifestation of a real and perfect Barbie, postmodern little girls begin to destroy their dolls and hurl them skyward.

Both images, strikingly similar in setting and framing, are nothing less than metaphors for human evolution. They throw in our faces that violence is perhaps the only means by which man, faced with an almost existentialist rejection given by radical change, is able to react. Let us not forget that the doll’s launch on the market in ’58 punctuated two eras-one pre and one post-Barbie-allowing Mattel then to rout all competition.

But the film is just beginning, and going forward, thanks to Gerwig, a myth that has reigned for more than half a century falls (finally).

Article by Gaia Simonetti