Barbie or the ultimate form of product placement.
The toy giant Mattel is launching film production to revive the plummeting sales of its iconic doll, criticized for its normative measurements and stereotypical beauty.
A $100 million marketing coup entrusted to Greta Gerwig, muse of independent cinema (Frances Ha, Greenberg) who became feminist director (Lady Bird, The Daughters of Doctor March).
This has been the tour de force of capitalism since its birth: to appropriate its criticism and transform it into merchandise or entertainment.
But that doesn't detract from the talent of the filmmaker, who undoubtedly goes beyond Mattel's order (to dust off her doll) and takes the opportunity to settle scores with the patriarchy by taking us into a whirlwind of humor that is entirely jubilant fact.
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The emancipation of little girls
A prologue in the form of a parody of
2001, A Space Odyssey,
recalls that Barbie was first invented in the 1960s to participate in the emancipation of little girls, until then confined to playing mother with their baby.
Barbie and her variations - Doctor, Lawyer, President... - liberate women.
Or the bimbo.
In Barbieland, a flashy and plastic paradise, Barbies have power, from the pink house to the Supreme Court.
The Kens are content to show off their pecs at the beach.
They don't even know how to surf.
Stereotype Barbie (the tall, busty blonde played by Margot Robbie) doesn't do much either, except dance and party in her dream house.
One morning, she wakes up in a panic with pony breath, flat feet, cellulite and morbid thoughts.
Weird Barbie explains to him that she is connected to a real person in the Real World and that they interact.
Off to Los Angeles, with Ken in the back seat, which is not the wonderful world for women that Barbie thought she inspired.
Although she clarifies that she does not have a vagina, she is the victim of sexism as soon as she arrives in Santa Monica.
She is hardly better received by teenage girls.
“
You’ve given women complexes since your invention,”
a schoolgirl tells him.
You're setting feminism back fifty years, and you're destroying the planet with consumerism, you fascist
.
» The CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell), a greedy boss surrounded by white males in black suits and ties, wants to put the lost Barbie back in her box.
Unexpected conclusion
And Ken?
Ken is useless and his interpreter Ryan Gosling has unrestrained fun playing the brainless toy boy, happy to import the patriarchy to Barbieland, renamed Kendom after his Californian stay.
The Barbies are reprogrammed into brain thalassotherapy mode and transformed into maids just good at massaging feet.
The Kens indulge in mansplaining while drinking “drinking beers”.
That doesn't stop the melancholy, sung by Gosling in a hilarious musical number: "I'm just Ken / A little blond, fragile thing."
» Barbie does not escape the existential crisis either, symbol of the contradictory injunction given to women (attractive but not seductive, ambitious but not overwhelming, independent but not selfish, etc.).
The conclusion, funny and unexpected, ends up making this Barbie a great post-MeToo heroine