Renée is a thirty year old New Yorker who works at the site of a superglamour cosmetic company from the basement of a flat in Chinatown. His dream is to move to the company’s parent company, a sumptuous skyscraper in the center of Manhattan, but Renee thinks it is not appropriate to the look of her colleagues, all skinny, very tall and beautiful. On the contrary, she has a few extra pounds and is not what the glossy magazines identify as “undeniably beautiful”. But when, following an accident at the gym, Renée sees her dream of undeniable beauty realized, all the streets suddenly seem to open before her eyes.
It is only his gaze to perceive, reflected in the mirror, a Renée from the cover: the others continue to see it exactly as it is.
How I become beautiful works precisely on the deforming power of the gaze – that of others on us, but above all ours on ourselves (and in particular ourselves) – and relies on an eminently visual means such as cinema to guide us to recognize Renée as you can see, that is always more attractive. Unlike many other films on the sudden physical transformation of a protagonist (like Big, to whom Come I become beautiful she makes explicit reference), this comedy introduces the element of novelty of a subjective perception sufficient to trigger an inner change that, in the eyes of others, it becomes gradual aesthetic improvement.
Big is not the only movie Come How I Become Beautiful, directorial debut of the duo of writers who has signed other comedies in which the physical aspect was an important element as The truth is that he does not like enough and never been kissed, makes reference: above Renée hovers the ghost of Bridget Jones (played, coincidentally, by Renée Zellweger) and all the chick lit aesthetic, from Sex and the City to The Devil wears Prada to I Love Shopping.
How I become beautiful is imbued with pop culture concerning the feminine look of “it girl”: references to Kardashian and Hadid, cameos from the fashion world (Lauren Hutton in the shoes of the founder of the cosmetics company, Naomi Campbell in those a member of the board) and the web (Emily Ratajkowski, more famous for her selfies than for her cinematographic interpretations).