Barbie poster
The Films That Shaped It

Barbie

2023 · Greta Gerwig · European Cinema

Greta Gerwig has said she watched Jacques Demy's 1964 French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — a film where every word is sung, every surface is saturated with color — and understood immediately what Barbieland should be: a world where artifice isn't dishonesty, it's the only language adequate to feeling. Demy's films are devastating precisely because they're beautiful. The same sadness hides inside Barbie.