Je--e - Barbie -dir. By John Buchanan- Here

[Your Name], Cinematic Surrealism Weekly

If you go into Buchanan’s Jeune / Barbie expecting the glossy, nostalgic camp of the 2023 Greta Gerwig blockbuster, you are walking into the wrong theater. Buchanan, the experimental auteur behind the unsettling Suburbia Zero and the silent epic Porcelain Skin , has done something both perverse and brilliant: he has taken the most manufactured icon of American girlhood and turned her into a post-human elegy. The film’s title is a puzzle. Officially stylized as Je--e - Barbie , the missing letters are never explicitly confirmed in the dialogue. Some critics argue it is Jeune (French: young), pointing to the film’s obsession with premature aging and cosmetic decay. Others insist it is Jesse —a ghost name Barbie whispers to a discarded Ken doll in the second act. Je--e - Barbie -Dir. by John Buchanan-

Buchanan cuts from this discovery to a real archival clip of a 1960s Mattel factory—women with hairnets assembling thousands of identical smiles. The implication is devastating: Barbie isn't a woman. She is a product that dreamed it was a woman. It would be remiss not to mention the audience walkouts. At my screening, a group of women wearing "Barbie Est. 1959" t-shirts left during the third-act monologue where Unit 01 confronts a giant, floating Sindy doll (voiced by Tilda Swinton). The Sindy whispers: "You are the tapeworm of the toy box. You ate joy and shat out consumerism." [Your Name], Cinematic Surrealism Weekly If you go

There is a moment exactly 47 minutes into John Buchanan’s controversial new film Jeune / Barbie where the title character—played with vacant terror by newcomer Mia Harlow—stares into a funhouse mirror at a Malibu beach party. She doesn’t see her iconic ponytail or her arched feet. She sees a void shaped like a woman. Officially stylized as Je--e - Barbie , the

Have you seen Jeune / Barbie ? Did you walk out during the "Molded Men" ballet sequence? Let me know in the comments below.