Eurocentric examinations of femininity in cinema have often advanced a myopic vision that neglects the intersectionality of caste, class, and other socio-economic factors shaping the predicament of women from societies with colonial histories—both recent, as in India, and more distant, as exemplified by the United States. Such perspectives often portray the subaltern as a homogeneous collective, overlooking societal fissures within its own structure. Yet, despite temporal disparities in their respective imperial pasts, both nations have cultivated a cinematic grammar that is simultaneously a product of and a response to these intersecting hierarchies—one rooted in the paradox of the postcolony, wherein cultural and political resistance often coexists with intra-societal marginalization of women. This antithesis is evident not only in the broader narrative commentaries embedded within their film and television but also in distinct cinematographic and dialogical choices. Accordingly, this paper draws on theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Laura Mulvey, and others to comparatively deconstruct Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) and Mira Nair’s 2020 television adaptation of A Suitable Boy—itself based on Vikram Seth’s literary magnum opus. It argues that although the stylistic and cultural grammars through which these filmmakers articulate cross-cultural inequities diverge, a thematic preoccupation with gendered emancipation as a means for cultural decolonization—expressed through subversions of not only the feminine but also the homoerotic—remains a consistent through-line, irrespective of directorial approach.