Camper than a tree covered in twinkling tinsel, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella is nine-tenths big hair, dazzling space-wear and comic book set-dressing. It’s a journey of memorable daftness through a future draped in quintessential ’60s kitsch, with a double Oscar-winner as its perfectly fabulous heroine. Cult films don’t come much more diverting and divine than this.
Set in an unspecified future, its title sequence boasts Jane Fonda’s infamous weightless striptease (antics reproduced more than twenty-five years later by Kylie in her video for ‘Put Yourself in My Place’). As the film begins, Barbarella’s gravity-free, leisurely disrobing is brought to an abrupt end when Dianthus, President of Earth and Rotating Premier of the Sun System (Claude Dauphin) pops up on her spaceship’s monitor to deliver some alarming news to our adventuress.
The disappearance of scientist Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea) has triggered a crisis. The inventor of the alarming sounding ‘Positronic Ray’ is believed to be hiding out in the mysterious Tau Ceti where it is feared residents “could still be living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility”. Armed with a weapon borrowed from the Museum of Conflict our “five-star, double-rated Astro-Navigatrix” is sent on a mission to bring in the rogue boffin.
And off she flies in her fur-lined spaceship, guided by her computer Alphy. Her bizarre journey brings her into contact with a cacophony of colourful characters such as Mark Hand, the catchman (Ugo Tognazzi), as hairy inside his animal skin as out, and a randy bugger to boot. When she suggests that they make love by means of an “exaltation transference pill”, he pooh-poohs her suggestion and instead introduces her to the good old-fashioned bone-rattling method (an initially bemused Barberella protests: “But nobody has done that for centuries…it was proved distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency.”)
Her mission takes her to Sogo, the City of the Night. On this dangerous leg of her journey Barbarella is accompanied by blind angel Pygar (Danger: Diabolik’s John Phillip Law) who she has managed to seduce. A deeply unsettling and hostile place, Sogo is seedy, strange and murderous. There she encounters the Great Tyrant/ Black Queen, played by Performance’s Anita Pallenberg, who takes a rather slinky shine to her. Pallenburg looks every inch the dominatrix dictator but her purr-fect vocal performance comes courtesy of the wonderful Joan Greenwood (of Kind Hearts and Coronets fame).
Based on the sexy French comic by Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella was directed by Roger Vadim, then husband of Fonda. Unfortunately for all involved, on its release in 1968 it was something of a critical and commercial flop. However, it has stood the test of time beautifully and is a terrific wheeze throughout, with ample surreal humour and a multitude of cult figures (Marcel Marceau and David Hemmings also feature). You’d be hard-pressed to find a film which is more fun.
Jane Fonda makes for a superior sixties sex-kitten; her genius wit and ingenious wardrobe (costumes by Jacques Fonteray) never fail to impress and it’s impossible to imagine anyone else making such nonsense this lovable. As the frequently bemused Barbarella she exudes a sense of propriety and remains delightfully, earnestly po-faced in the face of relentless absurdity. Despite her outrageous costumes and even more outrageous escapades she’s an all-American heroine. It’s her very properness, set against her increasing forays into liberating improperness (with oh so devilish Europeans), which make the film.
Fonda was soon to become the poster-girl for the anti-Vietnam war movement and became the scourge of the American establishment when she was photographed seated on an anti-aircraft battery in Hanoi. And so it is that Barbarella, the warrior promoting peace, fits surprisingly snugly with Fonda’s real-life persona.
Barbarella’s approach is epitomised by the orgasmic torture device which is supposed to pleasure our heroine to death. Instead it is she who breaks the machine with her unparalleled sexual capacity. It’s a film that shares that capacity, being wilfully excessive – fizzing, sparking and blowing smoke (and a smattering of sequins) off the screen.
Barbarella – Cult Film Club (text) by Emma Simmonds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
