Two films about feminism and coming of age, where the first thirty minutes made me wonder, "Are they really going to make an entire movie out of this?"
For Barbie, the answer was "unfortunately, yes."
As for Edmond, it's a film I would have loved to share my love for with the rest of the world. I was ready to laugh and be enchanted, but... alas. The film boils down to a long series of winks the authors give to the audience to say, "Did you see how we turned that around? Pretty clever, huh?" Yes, yes, it's clever. But after ten winks, when you realize there's no real story, that the feminist or Mattel-related issues are just window dressing, and the characters are empty shells... you feel cheated. Like a long SNL sketch gone wrong. I struggled to make it to the end, and the ending didn't reward my effort.
Poor Things, by Yórgos Lánthimos, is different.
The characters, atmosphere, and humor are strange, unexpected, and once again, I feared the film would revel in this strangeness to the point of being stuck in it. But not at all: the film quickly moves forward; the characters evolve; the story progresses with an involved viewpoint and strong choices. It's a blend of fairy tale and philosophical tale, whose twists may seem far from our concerns – all these people are either much more beautiful or much uglier than us, often with very caricatured personalities, at least initially – but which ends up asking questions very close to ours: to what extent am I an extension of my parents? Am I too conditioned by society to be myself? How can I achieve a form of freedom and fulfillment in an imperfect world?
Like in any good fairy tale, we may not understand every reference – not everything is explained for once, thank you – but we feel that it speaks to us, and we come out of the movie theater a little transformed. Isn't that what cinema is all about?
