Tag: Greta Gerwig

Barbie

Posted on by victorfraga

Never before in your life have you seen as much pink. Costumes, houses, cars, streets and even the sky. Your eyes might suffer inflammation or photophobia. You might become pink-blind. This is a luminescent movie that exudes not just colour, flair and vigour, but also some very bright and gleaming messages. At a duration of nearly two hours, Greta Gerwig’s third feature film (after 2018’s Lady Bird and 2020’s Little Women) is her most expensive and commercial one, but this does not mean that the 39-year-old director has waived her auteurial sensibilities, her audacity, and her ability to touch and move even the most cynical and hardened of hearts.

Barbie starts out with a fitting tribute to cinema: the pre-human apes in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are replaced with pre-Barbie dolls (with the song Also Sprach Zaratrusta et al!). The narrator’s voice (Helen Mirren) explains that the curvaceous new toy revolutionised the world by empowering young girls, who could now play with an independent women, instead of feeding babies. We soon find out that reality isn’t that black and white, and that the doll manufactured by Mattel has other far less inspirational connotations. Not everyone perceives it as some sort of feminist icon. These contradictions are meticulously dissected and examined, without ever slipping into didacticism. Barbie is plush and loud throughout. It is never tedious and scholastic. Instead, it’s unabashedly plastic. It’s fantastic.

The titular doll is played by Margot Robbie, and her boyfriend Ken by Ryan Gosling, with his chest shaved and his hair bleached baby blond. Well, in fact nearly all of the neatly dressed, perfectly chiseled dolls that inhabit Barbieland are called Barbie or Ken, providing for the strangest film credits ever (with countless actors playing a character by the same name). Their life is perfect. The Barbies wake up in their dream house, literally jump into dream car and rive to the beach. They have trophys boyfriend with whom they can party but don’t have to spend the night with. Nobody knows where the Kens live. Everything is plastic and fake, from the blue sea (on which the dolls can walk) to the cars (which have to engine), or even the food and drink (the dolls make do that they eat/drink, without ingesting anything). Barbie and Ken have no genitalia.

Parallel to this bizarrely sanitised land is the “real” world, inhabited by real human beings.

One day, our protagonist Barbie (nicknamed “the stereotypical Barbie”, in reference to her mainstream looks) is horrified to find out that her feet have gone flat (instead of perennially curvy from wearing high heels) and that her leg is covered in cellulite. Plus she is having death thoughts. All thoroughly incompatible with the perfect world in which she lives. A fellow doll, who happens to be “ugly and weird” because her owner in the real world mistreated her, explains to Barbie that she is experiencing the same (a child in the real world is punishing her). So Barbie sets off on an incredible journey in order to find the girl responsible for her collapsing looks and dark thoughts. The passage from Barbieland to planet Earth is particularly impressive, with characters rollerskating, jet skying and cycling into the new dimension (or breaking and fixing the rift in the space-time continuum, as the film puts it). The inhabitants of the real world act are as futile and easily influenced as the dolls. The main differences are that they wear less colourful clothes, are prepared to use real violence, and possess very real genitalia. Another peculiarity (one that immediately strikes Barbie) is that in the real world it is the men who are in control. She never knew the patriarchy existed.

The many ensuing twists provide a fertile ground for the philosophical debate between various strands of feminism, and of the patriarchy. Does Barbie’s perfect body empower or imprison her, the movie seems to ask, leaving viewers scrambling for an answer. The film also raises questions about fascism and the frenzied search for perfection. Is it ok to seek beauty, or is this the trapping of a society as artificial and superficial as the waters of Barbieland Beach? Also notably, the movie explicitly asks: is it possible to subvert the dichotomy of the “weird and ugly” versus the “brainwashed”? In other words: is it possible to be beautiful and intelligent, or is Barbie doomed to be a “blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world” for eternity?

Ultimately, Barbie is a movie about the complicity between the various generations, the various classes and the various races of women. The female characters, however gullible and innocent, are ready to stick together and fight for each other. They successfully reconcile their differences because they understand that their distinctions (in look, colour or ideology) are an asset, and never a handicap. The men, on the other hand, are consumed by narcissism and competitiveness. They fight each other like rabid dogs locked inside a cage. There is no sense of solidarity. It is the males that provide the funniest moments of the movie, as Gerwig hilariously mocks toxic masculinity, conformity, consumerism and even American pop culture (think of the worst MTV video you’ve seen in your life and you’re halfway there).

Another takeaway from Barbie, perhaps a far less profound one, is that straight men can be skilfully Camp. With a capital “C”. Extreme masculinity is just as exaggerated and absurd as hyper-femininity, or the gayest of homosexuals. John Waters would probably be impressed. What’s there not to like about a pink-clad and fabulously cocky Ryan Gosling baring his smooth chest while twerking his face, in a display of his unwavering macho confidence.

The design, costumes, art direction are as impeccable as Barbie’s hair and attire. You will feel like you have been transported into a toy world.

Mattel plasticised humanity when they invented the Barbie doll 64 years ago. Greta Gerwig does just the opposite: she humanises plastic. They both deserve credit. The doll and the film are equally revolutionary, even if this type of revolution does not befit every female person on Earth. Thank God that real women – unlike the Barbie dolls – come in all shapes and forms, can think independently for themselves, and make their own choices.

Barbie is in cinemas worldwide on Friday, July 21st. On all major VoD platforms on September 1st.

Lady Bird

Posted on by victorfraga

As one grows older and poignantly ponders life, thus far, it’s hard not to think about the place and people with whom you grew up. To some, the thought of their hometown sends shivers down their spine. Whereas with others, their love for it is devout. Confusingly mixed somewhere in the middle, Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) seeks a level of independence that comes with leaving home for college. Searching to do so her hometown Sacramento (California), in 2002, the themes of Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird steep themselves in the companionship that comes in family and friendship. Not only does Gerwig construct one of the year’s best films, it’s one of the most self-assured and poignantly crafted movies ever made on the touching intimate connections we as humans have with place, people and a certain period in our lives.

Working as a semi-autobiographical solo debut for Gerwig, who is only 34 years old, her film has little room for any unnecessary clichéd romances, disasters or melodramatic tones. Bestowed with an adoring aura towards its characters, working under the likes of her long-time partner Noah Baumbach and Whit Stillman has imbued her writing with a dexterous and unique tone edge.

A name given to ‘me by me’, Lady Bird is an assured young woman eager to get into a cultured East coast college ‘like Yale but not Yale’. Played by Saoirse Ronan with an alluring vitality, she lives on ‘wrong side of the tracks’ with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), father (Tracy Letts) and brother (Jordan Rodriguez). In Christine’s relationship with her family, one sees the daily struggles and joys portrayed in a manner so detailed and nuanced they clearly come from an emotional place in Gerwig’s heart. Opening with both Christine and her mother, Marion, returning from visiting a local college, whilst listening to an audio tape of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Lady Bird hilariously and dramatically decides to jump out of the car after a short argument. Through such a decision, Ronan’s character is bestowed with a comic and rebellious nature.

At the bottom of her high school’s social hierarchy, with her best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein), the two girls embrace everything about one another. After auditioning for musical theatre together, Christine sees the charming Danny (Lucas Hedges) perform, consequentially deciding to romantically pursue him. A juxtaposition to a formulaic ‘chick flicks’ relationship, their time together is infused with little charms and ticks which fill with their young love with a warmth and affection. After dating Danny, her eyes move towards a more rebellious boy in the form of Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), who consumes himself in philosophical books, rejecting capitalism and plays in a hip band. Nonetheless, his cool aesthetic absorbs the heart of Christine.

Selecting to set her first solo film in the early noughties offers some biographical information on Gerwig’s youth; hearing Justin Timberlake’s era-defining ‘Cry Me a River’ and David Matthew Band’s ‘Crash Into Me’ fills one’s eardrums with happiness. Still, Gerwig’s material foregrounds the distinctive tone of the era; a generation of school kids before mobile phones, snapchat and Kim Kardashian. Similarly, Lady Bird wishes she was living through something – which in fact she is. A post 9/11 world, referenced in a split second shot of a wall mural and TV News, is historically the basis for contemporary Trump America and futile conflicts in the West. Though a nostalgia for a false sense of pastness is inherent in all of us, we all live through something important and pivotal in history.

In her press junkets, the director has frequently discussed casting actors who can ‘hit home runs’ (or a six if you prefer cricket). Specifically, in the casting of Laurie Metcalf as Marion and likewise Tracy Letts as her father, the emotional weight of Lady Bird’s familiar ties rest in their interactions with Ronan. Metcalf taps into an assertive mother who simply wants the best for her daughter, displaying it through a form of tough love. In a delicate line of dialogue which explains Marion’s mother ‘as a violent alcoholic’, Gerwig’s dialogue elicits a whole backstory for Marion, accentuated by the acting ability of Metcalf. Granted the two clash, as any family members do, yet the fundamentals of their relationship is love. In the instance of Letts, he is one of a small number of male figures present in Christine’s life. What he brings to Mr Larry McPherson is a tactile sense of vulnerability and world-weariness, with an undying tenderness for offering support.

Behind the camera, cinematographer Sam Levy creates sumptuous moments with natural lighting, equally filling the frame with the same tender affection displayed in performance and dialogue. Lady Bird feels as though it is constructed by a director at the top of their game, not just starting out. Its charming writing – complemented by Saoirse Ronan and the casts – naturally instils Gerwig’s awkward and lovable screen persona into her directorial solo debut. If I existed in this world, I would indeed vote Lady Bird for President- as she would so want.

Lady Bird has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. It is out in cinemas on Friday, February 16th. On Netflix in February 2020.