(apologies if this post doesn’t fully make sense, its a passionate ramble)
Since my first watch of Lady Bird in 2018, I declared Greta Gerwig my favourite director, which is some feat considering she only had one solo-directed film out at the time. However, I felt so connected to the film and characters she had written and the more I’ve grown since watching, the more her films resonate with me and I’m starting to realise why.
As most people would know by now, Barbie released this week, Gerwig’s biggest film to date and as a massive fan of the director and a girl who played with Barbie’s this film was a big deal for me. I attended both the day it released and again in a double feature with Oppenheimer which has given me plenty of time to reflect on the film (which believe me, I have done a lot of).
On the first watch of Barbie I was not fully sure of what to expect from the blockbuster but I was greeted with both a warm feeling of happiness and also an immense wave of sadness, never had I seen something that so accurately presents the ideas of girlhood and growing out… until I thought about her previous works. Both Lady Bird and Little Woman explore these same topics and do them so well, Barbie is not the departure from her works that some people think and it so clearly has Greta’s stamp all over it.
Before the rewatch I went home and rewatched Lady Bird and Little Woman, which have always been my comfort films and I started to understand truly why. Lady Bird shows the ups and downs of being a teenage girl navigating her life and Little Women explore the relationships between girls, childhood and growing up. Whilst thinking about the three films and their similarities I stumbled across an interview with Gerwig where she states in some ways all the movies she had co-written, written or directed are talking to one another further leaving us with the devastating quote ‘That ache of contradictions of never being able to totally bridge that gap between adulthood and childhood is present in this movie (Barbie) too, it’s this overflowing sense of joy and then its also “I can never get back there”‘. All three films are on completely different topics but all share the same wonderful yet heartbreaking sentiments about being a woman at different points of time, yet it is still so similar.
The second time I watched Barbie was with my housemates, we were in a screening full of woman and girls all wearing pink and feeling the same things, there was a beautiful moment where we were crying and the girl in front was crying and we all bonded over the film and emotions. Never have I felt so safe and seen in a room before and it truly was a magical moment, and this is what Barbie is for.
rosie reviews 