Being a lady in 2025 means dwelling inside a contradiction.
You’re anticipated to be formidable with out being “an excessive amount of,” nurturing with out being consumed, assured with out being smug, and exhausted with out ever trying drained. It’s a juggling act that isn’t actually a alternative if you happen to pause to consider it. It’s extra like a endless efficiency as a result of the cameras are at all times rolling, the viewers by no means leaves, and somebody retains altering the script behind your again. Some days, you’re advised you’ll be able to have all of it, different days you’re reminded try to be grateful for crumbs. It’s a dizzying sort of whiplash.
Films have at all times tried to seize what it means to be a lady, typically decreasing us to tropes just like the mom, the muse, the manic pixie dream lady. However currently, movies have been giving us characters that resist straightforward classes. They’re not good and as a substitute present the messy, contradictory truths of womanhood, like wanting extra however fearing it, craving love however wanting freedom, carrying the load of duty and invisibility. The next characters are reflections (or fragments) of what it feels wish to be a girl in 2025.
Nora – Previous Lives
Previous Lives is a quietly devastating story about childhood sweethearts, Nora and Hae Sung, who reunite years later solely to seek out that their lives couldn’t be extra completely different. However this isn’t only a love story – it’s concerning the completely different variations of ourselves that we create out of perceived necessity and forcing ourselves to push apart what we actually need. The movie lingers within the silence between them, the place love and longing blur into questions of destiny since Nora is married to another person.
However Nora’s story isn’t actually about selecting between two males as a lot as it’s about selecting between the lady who left South Korea and the lady who may have stayed. Her dilemma mirrors the alternatives many ladies face, like profession versus household, ambition versus stability, and self-fulfillment versus expectation. None of those decisions are incorrect, but whichever path you select, you’re haunted by the shadow of the highway not taken.
Stereotypical Barbie – Barbie
A blinding, satirical tackle the world’s most well-known doll, Barbie follows Stereotypical Barbie as she begins to query the proper world of Barbieland. What begins off as a narrative stuffed with colour and glitter slowly turns into a uncooked portrait of contemporary womanhood. Barbie is adored and mocked in equal measure, worshiped for being good however criticized for being faux. That’s precisely what it feels wish to be a lady – the focus and invisible all on the similar time. As such, Barbie’s awakening is much less about rejecting femininity than redefining it.
She discovers that the pink heels and shiny smiles have been by no means the issue. It was the expectation that she be solely these issues. This feels acquainted in a time when girls are advised that they are often something whereas additionally being warned to not outshine males, when self-care is branded and bought again to us as one other job, and when each alternative (to marry, to not marry, to have children, to not) turns into a referendum on our price.
Sophie – Aftersun
On the floor, Aftersun is a narrative a couple of father-daughter trip. Beneath, it’s a narrative concerning the grief kids carry with out phrases. Because the movie progresses, Sophie slowly absorbs her father’s quiet despair whereas not having the ability to title it. Her story captures the best way girlhood typically means rising up too quick, pressured to make sense of feelings larger than your vocabulary. Womanhood, in some ways, begins with these silences.
These are the moments wherein you notice the adults round you’re breakable, love doesn’t save folks, and that grief is stitched into the seams of on a regular basis life. Girls nonetheless inherit these unstated burdens. Many people develop into translators of ache, studying between the strains of household dynamics, carrying the feelings nobody else will title. Sophie embodies that innocence of wanting to only be a child, whereas plagued with the heavy information that one thing is incorrect.
Amy – Little Girls
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Girls breathes new life into Louisa Might Alcott’s traditional, following the March sisters as they chase love and independence in Nineteenth-century America. Amy March has lengthy been misunderstood because the useless sister, however this film redeems her as a fancy girl who needs every thing and refuses to apologize for it. Ambition, love, artwork, cash – she doesn’t see them as contradictions, however as requirements.
As a lady, that feels radical since we’re nonetheless shamed for wanting extra. If you happen to search monetary safety, you’re materialistic. If you happen to prioritize love, you’re dependent or clingy. If you happen to’re formidable, you’re mechanically branded as egocentric. Amy reveals us that these binaries are traps and {that a} girl can need for all of it, and that ambition is mainly important for our survival. And her declaration that marriage is an financial proposition is definitely fairly correct, given the present divorce fee.
Womanhood Isn’t A Straight Line
What ties these girls collectively are the contradictions wherein they exist. Nora, Barbie, Sophie, and Amy stretch themselves throughout identities and histories and expectations. They remind us that womanhood isn’t a clear arc from innocence to empowerment, however a relentless negotiation in a world that usually asks an excessive amount of of us and at all times appears to provide too little again. To be a lady in 2025 is to reside inside these paradoxes.
These characters don’t provide neat options to this existential dilemma, however they do provide companionship in order that we all know we aren’t the one ones who really feel pulled aside. Films might not at all times get womanhood proper, however once they do, it seems like recognition. Like somebody lastly noticed the contradictions we’re pressured to hold, and that regardless of having the chances stacked in opposition to us, present us that we nonetheless have a life to be lived.