A French Barbie movie poster has sparked speculation and online commentary due to a sexual double entendre.
Il French poster of the film Barbie has sparked many comments and criticisms due to a double meaningperhaps unintentional or designed to increase attention on the project with stars Greta Gerwig and Ryan Gosling.
The image is perfectly in line with those already circulated online in various languages, but the translation of the sentence accompanying the image has given rise to some doubts.
The phrase that surprised French fans
In the Barbie poster, arriving in Italian cinemas on July 21, we read “She can do anything. He’s just Ken“. The phrase literally means: “She can do it all. He’s just Ken“. In French slang, however, ken is a synonym for fuck. The sentence then becomes: “She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to fuck“.
Several French Twitter users have pointed out that ken, which since the 1980s has become a way to refer to fornicatee It isbeing homophone of sait (sa), can radically change the meaning of the sentence on the poster.
After the dissemination of the poster, some claimed it was a precise choice, given that the initial sentence in the original version of the posters was Barbie is everythingthat is to say Barbie is everythingwithout any reference to any capabilities.
Study commentary
A source of The Hollywood Reporter who works in the field of marketing claims that it was a precise lexical choice: “There is no way a native French speaker could have overlooked the joke. It’s actually almost brilliant“.
Warner Bros moreover, he did not want to comment on what happened, declaring only that the attention to the marketing campaign demonstrates the interest in the release of the film in France_”.