Last Wednesday the photo of Ryan Gosling as Ken the famous Mattel doll. There he is, discolored, wearing a jean vest and showing the elastic of his underpants. That will be the image of him in Greta Gerwig’s movie (written by her and Noah Baumbach, due summer 2023) about an even more famous doll: ‘Barbie’. There are some doubts about that image, the one of Margot Robbie as the famous doll, that had already been shared a few weeks ago, and what (little) is known about the project: Is Greta Gerwig supposed to give a shake to the nostalgia that has kidnapped contemporary cinema and television? Is she going to turn the concept of her upside down to show us how absurd it is to live anchored to the past? Are Gerwig and Baumbach, two magnificent filmmakers, going to defuse the current commitment to the survival of myths and stories from the past? Or are we just putting too much hope into what they can do about it, projecting into that movie before we see it what we’d like to see happen?
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