Movies are the world of magic, a world I was introduced to at the age of six, when my aunt dropped off my cousin and me to the steps of Eros, the iconic Art Deco Theatre in Mumbai to watch Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in the unforgettable musical “My Fair Lady”

Since then, I’ve loved watching movies. With or without the popcorn and colas .

Sadly during CoVid, movie watching was restricted to Netflix and I sorely missed the experience of a big screen, specially since I was brought up on a diet of 2 big screen movies a week. I know this sounds like a lot of screen time but believe me, for us it was just 6 hours a week because we grew up in a land of no television. Also the movies were shown in the Club where all the kids used to go so it was just another extension of our play time.

The last theatre experience I had was a late night show at my favourite movie theatre INOX INSIGNIA at Atria Mall . No matter how many movies I go to, each time I walk through the door to a movie theatre, I feel the thrill of walking into a magic land. And the Inox at Atria definitely evokes those feelings as I walk into the lobby with its retro decor.

The last time I saw a movie here was a late night show of TOP GUN. But watching the movie from the first row was a bit too much to handle particularly when the planes literally whizzed over my head.

So this time round we decided to skip the online reservations and choose our own seats right up at the even though it meant that Jo and I had to carefully trudge up the steps.

Barbie?

BARBIE would seem an unlikely choice for two ladies fast fading from their prime but an interesting movie critique by Mandira Nevatia caught my attention. If a young woman who definitely did not play with dolls could sit through its pinkness, surely I, with my childhood passion for dolls, would be able to sit through it?

Like hundreds of little girls the world over, dolls have always been my favourite toy. Whether they were hand made or crude wooden ones, the advent of Barbie, the perfectly proportioned plastic doll introduced by Mattel truly changed the world of Dolls for girls the world over.

Growing up I had 21 in all and spent hours with them , bathing them , combing out their hair, making clothes for them, celebrating their birthdays and even ‘teaching’ them what I’d learnt at school . I had them all: the baby doll that peed when bottle fed, the bendy leg ones with eyes that blinked shut when sleeping, to the larger blue eyed walkie talkies with their stiff mechanical movements and unfamiliar American drawl.

Barbies came much later in my life – in my early teens in fact when my interest in dolls was fading. That didn’t, however, dampen my enthusiasm for her and I actually had 5 Barbies and a Ken! Having Ken was unusual because these dolls were almost always gifts from family overseas so when we got a Barbie and a Ken, we decided to celebrate with an authentic Catholic wedding particularly since we were staying in Bandra in those days and I so longed to wear my Sunday Best as did my friends who marched off to church every Sunday. So my cousins and I organised the wedding replete with cake and ‘champagne’ tossing in a week’s honeymoon in Grannie’s cupboard. I still remember how aghast we were when we found out that Ken dislocated his leg and were annoyed with the grown-ups’ sniggers and Wink-Wink glances.

Barbie in the real world

For those of you who don’t like Barbie or never played with her like my own girls, Ms. Papaya, her mother Prima Donna and aunt Anna Shetty, it would come as a surprise that Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie was far from a real life Bimbo as one could imagine. She was an entrepreneur through and through and sought to create a doll that would inspire young girls to become trail blazers.

Mattel’s attempt at making Barbie universally appealing made them diversify into Barbies with different identities and ethnicities. Yet Barbie in her own world is near perfect with the sun perpetually shining in her immaculate world ruled entirely by women .

But one day when Barbie discovers a layer of cellulite forming under her perfectly sculpted legs and horror of horrors -she no longer balances on her tippy toes, she seeks the help of Weird Barbie who tells her that she is being messed up by a girl real world is playing with her. The solution to this was a visit to the real world to sort things out.

Thus Barbie finds herself in Venice Beach , Los Angeles with the faithful Ken in tow. But the real world poses problems for the two with Barbie getting lewd comments and hate comments while Ken is stunned at the respect he solicits from strangers and also amazed that he is incapable of getting a job despite his perfectly sculpted body.

Ken is spell bound by the power of Patriarchy and quickly returns to Toyland to change the world for the other Kens. Barbie is equally horrified by the real world and goes back with her human friends who help her escape from the being captured by the Board of Mattel chasing her desparately with the hope of restoring peace in the real world without a stridently feminist Barbie in their midst. Yet, at the end of the day, Barbie comes back to the real world to play her part as a real life woman rather than live as the perfect, stereotypical Barbie in Toyland with emasculated men completely in the shadow of her loving gaze.

Yay or Nay?

Naturally a movie like this, playing at the same time as Oppenheimer was bound to generate conversation. I didn’t see Oppenheimer for very personal reasons ( I’d heard it was long and tedious) but I thoroughly enjoyed Barbie in her bubblegum pink world. It is light and frothy yet addresses many feminist issues that will always remain.

Which brings us to the question we all ask ourselves:

Is it better to live in a perfect world where nothing ever goes wrong for the women or live in reality warts and all?

Ciao