Pink is everywhere, in the queues of cinemas, on the covers of magazines, in the illustration of articles, reviews, forums. Barbie swept the bet. Inevitable: the doll is, in fact, an empty shell, inviting all projections and fantasies, each one drawing the mythical blonde according to their ideology. Feminist Barbie, misandre Barbie, consumer society Barbie, liberated Barbie, woke Barbie, etc. Exhausting. Barbie wears a reflective tiara that catches the eye as much as the ideas, hypnotizing and reassuring Barbie that everyone appropriates, just like, when children, we dressed her in adventures of which we were the heroines and of which Ken was only an accessory, boring and bland. Men are now all reduced to being stupid Kens under the influence, identifications in the negative, which does no service to any struggle, to no equality, but adds cliché to cliché, stupidity to hatred.
Barbie in inclusive fashion silly, cardboard feminism, posture ofempowerment winded, won. Worryingly, she beat Oppenheimer.
Christopher Nolan is a great director, his Oppenheimer up to expectations. Monster film that brilliantly combines individual and collective destinies, questions the mediocrity of men and the will to power, questions patriotism and choice, all carried by exceptional actors and a staging with a scalpel, without fat, without sleeve effects , cinema as we had forgotten it could still exist. The intelligence of the film is also due to the sensory experience which takes us to the heart of Oppenheimer’s psyche, to his visions and sensations, his doubts as well as his certainties, which dialogue to lead him towards innovation.
Should the nuclear bomb be used? Was a genius scientist with communist sympathies to be trusted? Does every genius have his Salieri in ambush ready to jump at his throat in revenge for his lack of talent? Where do men go to cry over their mistakes and failures?
Barbie will always lose to Polanski
When Oppenheimer is questioned about the advance of Nazi nuclear research, he replies that anti-Semitism will help them win, because Hitler considers quantum physics to be a Jewish thing, and therefore does not believe in it. In a succinct exchange, all the anti-Semitic madness of the Nazis, Hitler’s delirious obsession with losing the war rather than leaving a single Jew alive, explodes in our faces. It cannot be repeated enough how anti-Semitism is a self-destructive disease, a visceral and endless hatred, a murderous frenzy born of frustration and resentment. Visionary crazy enough to create a city in the heart of the desert and bring together scientists and families there to share the knowledge necessary for the development of the total weapon, Oppenheimer chose to wear, the first days, the military uniform, like to recall the reality of the war raging on the Old Continent and the massacre of the Jews. Meanwhile, in the heart of Europe at war, the Shoah systematically and industrially destroys the Jews of Europe, and the destiny of Roman Polanski, a child of the Warsaw ghetto before fleeing with his father and being hidden in the depths of the Polish countryside, is played out. Walk in Krakow is perhaps a failed film, badly edited, badly put together, but it is an essential film. Follow Polanski and his childhood friend Ryszard Horowitz in the streets that saw them grow up, before, during and after the war, moving from apartment to apartment, from graves to regrets, from rewritings to denials, rediscovering memories and sometimes stubbornly refusing – like Polanski who cannot open his grandmother’s door, the last place where the whole family was reunited before the end – is heartbreaking, a reminder of the horror that was the Holocaust, of what remains when the dead can never be completely buried, of a childhood that oscillates between primary joys and an impossible tragedy. Still today and forever. Roman Polanski remains, dignified and sublime, a mischievous and grave, light and deep 89-year-old child, carrying within him and for us the History that tossed him from one death to another, become this filmmaker who makes us touch the ambiguities, contradictions and disarray of all human life. Barbie will always lose to Polanski.