Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Barbie it is a film about the relationship between mothers and daughters. The Beginning – which evokes the greatest film of all time, 2001 A space odyssey – It is brilliant.
But the real model is Pinocchio. Barbie eventually becomes a womanand seals her metamorphosis with the initiatory rite of all young women: the gynecological examination.
In the middle there is such a mass of stereotypes, that the film itself risks appearing like a gigantic stereotype. Barbie becomes president, manager, Supreme Court judge, but she always remains tall, slim, beautiful: definitely too “demanding”.
Instead of inspiring confidence in girls, it ends up putting too much pressure on them. Like supermodels, which in the 80s were said to be useful for men to compare them with their girlfriends and live unhappily.
In reality, Barbie represents what mothers dream for their daughters. Hence the rebellion of the film’s teenage co-protagonist. But from here also the connection, the newfound empathy, the love that inextricably binds mother and daughter; although the relationship between mother and daughter is always complex, in the Anglo-Saxon world but perhaps even more so in the Mediterranean world, where until not long ago male children were hoped for by brides.
Margot Robbie is really great, Ryan Gosling, on the other hand, struggles to get rid of the smirk reminiscent of the prince of western Libya of the poet Kavafis, who was mistaken for a really cool guy because he was always silent but in reality he was silent for fear of saying something stupid; «And who knows how he suffered with all those conversations that exploded inside him».
Barbie it is also a film about sisterhood, about female solidarity, on the competition for the male, on the centuries-old acceptance of patriarchy, on the difficulties that being a child, adolescent, woman, daughter, mother still entails today; with those thoughts of death that we try to reject rather than accept them and make them flow away, and with that perfect definition of anxiety, the fear of something you don’t know what it is.
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All articles by Aldo Cazzullo.
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