Review of the movie ‘Barbie’: pink, feminist, fantastic!, by Desirée de Fez

Mystery revealed: ‘Barbie’ is magnificent. Few films will we see in a long time so defined, so concrete, so perfect, so militant and so funny as Greta Gerwig’s about the Mattel doll. If the promotional material, difficult to decipher, and the doubts surrounding a project that had been dragging on for a long time left a door open to the possibility of failure, that door is sealed a few minutes after the start of Gerwig’s fantasy. A fantasy understood as the acid sublimation of the real world.

The director of ‘Lady Bird’ (2017), who signs the script with Noah Baumbach, turns Barbie into the protagonist of a deliberately feminist comedy. It is not a comedy with complicit winks to those of us who dreamed of the possibility that Gerwig would tell the story from there. It just is, everything revolves around that. Without going into details of the plot, his story is about that. His humor goes from that. They are not isolated or shoehorned slogans. It is its essence. And all that comedy at the expense of patriarchy, the social (and political) role of women, sexism and other concepts that are repeated (and verbalized) throughout the film works like a shot for something very simple: ‘Barbie ‘ is a film made with intelligence and very funny.

Light years away from Twitter jokes, Gerwig and Baumbach’s script combines with admirable precision wit, commitment to the present, grace and a biting but not hostile bad milk (they are not two screenwriters being smarter than anyone). The percentage of ‘Barbie’ verbal jokes is very high. There is no truce. It is one after the other, in a machine as perfect as that of, let’s say, ‘Zoolander’ (2001), a very different film but in which you look at some things.

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But the value of ‘Barbie’ is not only in the text. The feeling when seeing it is that everything flows in the same direction, that everyone involved understood the project in the same way.. Everything works in favor of Gerwig’s feminist fantasy, from the interpretation of the actors to an absolutely overwhelming artistic direction (the fidelity to the universe of the doll is surprising and the level of detail with which its outfits, its objects, its houses are reproduced ) or a masterful use of music.

In relation to this, ‘Barbie’ has a happy addition to its selection of songs, full of hits and lyrics that complete the story, and its musical numbers: the choreography, staging and direction of Ken’s number are impressive. But, without a doubt, it is in Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling that Gerwig has his best allies.. Although they had already shown their comic vision before, both are confirmed as magnificent comedy actors. They deserve all the awards for their control of mimicry, physical gag and emotion. Yes, emotion too: the director of ‘Little Women’ has managed to make her film moving, in addition to being fun, sharp and (very) pink.