‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’: The French New Wave movie that inspired Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’
The first-ever live-action Barbie movie has been nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. Aided by a stellar marketing campaign and the much-discussed ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon, Barbie became the highest-grossing movie of 2023. It’s already had a considerable impact on popular culture, a trend which will no doubt continue in the years to come.
The film has also been one of the year’s best-reviewed wide releases, defying many expectations. In the years leading up to its release, some probably assumed it would just be a disposable bit of brightly-coloured fluff. To a degree, this is an understandable prediction. It is a movie based on a line of dolls, after all, and all previous Barbie movies had been direct-to-DVD animations.
Nonetheless, many others might’ve predicted that this movie would end up becoming something rather special, a project far more than a cynical cash-in. Why? Because Greta Gerwig was in the director’s chair. She is a truly incredible filmmaker who never lets you down, and in her third solo directional outing, she delivered once again.
With its bright colours, astonishing production design and captivating toy-like aesthetic, Barbie has proven to be an instantly iconic movie. When crafting the look of the project, Gerwig drew on a number of influences, one of which was the 1964 French New Wave musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
A widely-loved masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is celebrated for its captivating and colourful visuals. Gerwig herself called the film “astonishingly beautiful” and revealed that she and Barbie‘s DOP Rodrigo Prieto drew inspiration from the painterly look of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg when creating the look of their own production.
Perhaps as a way of acknowledging this debt, Gerwig paid homage to the film more explicitly by, in one scene, having the main character (Margot Robbie) wear the same hairstyle as Catherine Deneuve sports in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Having said all of that, this was far from the only work that Gerwig drew on.
Discussing her inspiration, Gerwig created a list of 33 films that helped her craft the already-legendary fantasy epic. The list included many other Technicolor musicals, such as The Wizard of Oz, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. In addition, the selection also featured some less obvious choices, such as The Truman Show and The Godfather. Barbie might be an incredibly unique movie, but Gerwig borrowed from many other great works in order to bring her idiosyncratic vision to life.
