Certainly sensing the Faustian pact she was about to sign, Greta Gerwig needed a year of reflection before accepting, after only two productions (Lady Bird, in 2017, and The Daughters of Doctor March, in 2019), to be entrusted by Warner with the helm of a $100 million (€93 million) blockbuster.
The director and her co-writer - and companion -, Noah Baumbach, seem to be gesticulating in all directions to prove that they are keeping control, ignoring the ambition confessed by Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Mattel: "Moving from a manufacturing company from toys, which manufactures articles, to an intellectual property company, which manages franchises. »
After an incipit borrowed from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by Stanley Kubrick, Barbie immerses us in the world of Barbie Land, a little bubble of candy pink perfection in which Barbie (Margot Robbie) wakes up, living the same sunny day every day, in a setting of painted canvases, where only good humor and permanent leisure are tolerated – a girly version of the Truman Show.
Any former user of the doll can only let themselves be taken in by this familiar universe whose facticity is an inexhaustible source of gags: Barbie enjoys an empty cup of coffee, takes a shower without water, her feet are naturally arched... Every day, she meets her friends on the beach, every evening, we party.
Mechanisms of patriarchy
But one evening, on the dancefloor, Barbie thinks about death. The next day, a series of hiccups mar the regularity of daily life, and the beginnings of an existential crisis – and cellulite – rear their ugly heads. The doll must urgently go to the real world, in search of its tormented owner, who would be the cause of this breakdown.
There, in California, she discovered for the first time the widespread sexism, the disapproving opinion of the new generation, who accused her of being the face of "sexualized capitalism", the hypocrisy of the CEO of Mattel (the great Will Ferrell). Back in Barbie Land, her boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling) – a bottomless pit of stupidity – has brought back with him the mechanisms of patriarchy. It was the real world that tainted Barbie.
Beneath the kitsch derision, Barbie looks like the first assessment of post-Covid-19 Hollywood: auteurism devoured by the hegemony of franchises; permanent irony and postmodernity as narrative impasses; “reassuring familiarity” as a refuge for an industry in the midst of a moral crisis.
Finally, this is undoubtedly the most painful: the defense of a neoliberal and infantilizing feminism, this famous empowerment cooked in all sauces, a respectable facade of an uninhibited capitalism. If the details are signed by Greta Gerwig, the general picture belongs to the studio and to Mattel, which manages to save its junk from the onslaught of overly harsh criticism.
