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Rating: So, let’s say right off the bat that if there hadn't been the opportunity to see it in the original language, we wouldn’t have gone to see this film.
Because you can tell right away that it is one of those films where the Italian translation can only make certain dialogues, certain jokes, certain expressions "silly" - or at least MORE silly than they already are.
I have found, when exchanging opinions on foreign films with friends who have seen the dubbed versions, that I sometimes feel like we are talking about entirely different films. To hear them tell it, usually more ridiculous or trivial than warranted, when in my view they seemed all in all not bad.
To be clear, imagine a film like Salvatores' "Mediterraneo" dubbed in Norwegian.
Exactly. Up there they don't dub films, luckily for them. But when Mediterraneo won the Oscar, they had the terrible idea to translate the title into "Jeg elsker soldater" (I love soldiers). In doing so, they discouraged a good portion of the potential audience and with that title characterized the entire film in a decidedly trivial and, as mentioned, "silly" way. OK, it wasn't Bergman's The Seventh Seal, but it wasn't seventies soft-core porn either, which is what many Norwegians ended up believing, despite my attempts to reassure them.
Fortunately, however, since the city is teeming with foreign university students, the offer of films in the original language at cinemas has definitely increased. And so: Barbie.
It’s not a masterpiece, no, but it’s not entirely banal either. Nowadays, that's not nothing. However, it's not that much either.
The Barbies live in their ideal city where the Kens serve as charming decoration and are completely subservient to the women, who believe, thanks to their existence as dolls, they have saved the real female universe from the oppression of patriarchy.
They will discover that this is not the case.
We discover that the world as we know it is not the only possible one and that things could have (can) be very different.
All in a very Barbie context, very pink and very glittery, with truly remarkable set design and photography, excellent actors well set in their roles. Some lines are indeed memorable, others aimed more at the American audience, whose common ground does not obviously coincide with ours.
In short.
Perhaps if we weren't in such a strange historical moment, where it seems necessary to explain everything-but-really-everything one says, making a million distinctions to avoid being misunderstood or offending someone, trying to keep the level of discourse always national-populist because by now no one understands a damn thing anymore; if we weren't in such a period, then perhaps a good director like Greta Gerwig would have made a different and more courageous film, given that the subject treated would certainly have deserved it.
Perhaps. But perhaps not, because a billion dollars, no way would she have made that kind of money then.
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