Barbarella (1968)

Just perfect...

A lot of fun.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

9 millions dollars, in 1968, they meant A LOT of money. That's how much they spent on this... fantasy. The whole story is childlike, except for some soft sex and sexual innuendo. Jane Fonda was very appealing, without being vulgar. Her breasts and her ass are like a visual poem, she has something very angelic. It was natural, because she does it with an angel too (John Phillip Law - an unpleasing role for him). 3 years before Barbarella was made, in 1965, in Romania (where, unfortunately, I was also born...), a very talented director named Ion Popescu-Gopo, made a film called "De-as fi... Harap Alb"(I would be... Prince Charming). I do not know if Roger Vadim saw that film and he was inspired by it, but Barbarella is, in my opinion, very similar. Anita Pallenberg has her own charm in the role of The Great Tyrant, and the character of Milo O'Shea would get us, much later, the name of a famous band. In a smaller but important role - he is the first to make love with Jane Fonda - is the great Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi. David Hemmings (who, by an unfortunate coincidence, would die in Romania and would receive the most important role of his life from another Italian, Michelangelo Antonioni), has an interesting small role too. A few other future celebrities have also been involved in the production: Paco Rabanne, Carlo Rambaldi, David Gilmour, Fabio Testi, Antonio Sabato.

In 1968, cinema history was graced by the birth of an indubitable Sci-Fi classic, Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a visionary ground-breaker, while on the other end of genre's gamut, we also witnessed this French-Italian sexploitation adaptation of the racy French Sci-Fi comic strip. BARBARELLA, a French-Italian co-production, directed by Frenchman Roger Vadim and starring his then-wife Jane Fonda as the titular heroine, presented in an unspecified future, it is as outlandishly lavish of its setting, as goofily puerile of its bare-bones story. The opening gambit introduces Barbarella, an earth astronaut, strips herself from her space suit inside under the zero-gravity environment, against Seurat's famous pointillistic painting, a pastiche of high art and low pleasure to pander to audience's sensorium rams home immediately. Barbarella is sent to a galaxy far far away to look for an earthling named Durand Durand, an inventor of a deadly weapon which the President of Earth (Dauphin) thinks might fall into wrong hands. Her adventure consists of a nexus of chance encounters with various characters on the 16th planet of Tau Ceti, as a hapless and somewhat dimwit, but perennially spirited damsel-in-distress, saving from the assault of creepy dolls with razor-sharp teeth controlled by evil kids by the hirsute Catchman Mark Hand (Tognazzi), she consents to Mark's love-making proposal, not the pill- inducing high-tech consummation, but the old-fashioned way, which turns out to be quite toothsome, please, suspend your disbelief! Further on, she meets a blind angel Pygar (Law) who has lost the will to fly, Professor Ping (French mime icon, Marcel Marceau), an outcast living in a slipshod labyrinth, the leader of the resistance Dildano (Hemmings), the Great Tyrant and Black Queen of Sogo (Pallenberg), and her devilish concierge (O'Shea), Barbarella uses sex as a means to express her gratitude, Mark aside, she cannot keep her hands off the Adonis-like Pygar and through sex, she endows him the renewed strength of flying, and with Dildano, their coiffure-remodeling palm sex is so otherworldly steamy that it stuns an awkward bystander. The only savior she doesn't reciprocate in putting out is the one-eyed wench, the Great Tyrant in disguise, although lesbianism is explicitly hinted (the Tyrant keeps referring her as "Pretty Pretty") to tease out the male gaze. In the main, sex is Barbarella's strongest suit, in a crashingly bawdy episode, her unquenchable sexual drive can even render the infamous orgasm killing machine overload, in a way, sex becomes her lethal weapon eventually, which prefigures a forthcoming era of sex liberation. Mario Garbuglia's production design is as outré as one can imagine, along with Fonda's wardrobe showcase, while the film's rough-hewn special effect inevitably looks like a child's play, but together they confer a retro, varicolored splendor to today's spectators in the face of the props' overtly tacky tangibility. The plot is the film's underbelly, a rushed ending is atrociously wheeled out, but Fonda, in her most gratuitously sexed-up endeavor, delivers an open-faced seriousness and immediacy, she really cares to find out Durand Durand! However barmy it seems, at any rate, BARBARELLA doesn't shortchange its source material, a low-brow cartoon wallows in its high kitschy style with admirable candor, aka, the spirit of space camp!

People who are into James Bond Films will appreciate the tag line "Oh Jane!". In this case it also describes what is most important with regard to Barbarella. Jane Fonda. But while Jane has aged magnificently over the years, one can't say the same about Barbarella. Sadly, this is one of those movies, which were exciting then and when you watch it you can still see why that was the case, but nowadays it just isn't that exciting anymore. The visuals are clearly identified as staged, the oversexualization of Fonda seems forced and the story itself is pretty dull. Of course, one can image how this movie played at the time of its initial release. The guys who were in love with Fonda. The stoners and a little bit of counter culture. It has this B-Movie vibe, that would definitely come to life in the right, drugged up circumstances. But that wasn't the case when I watched. it Sober and interested in movie history I wanted to cover this gap. Finishing the movie I was satisfied with doing that, mildly entertained and of course thinking: Oh Jane!

Not great, but not that bad either.Set sometime in the distant future, a young Earth woman, Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda), is sent on a mission to find and stop the evil Durand Durand, who has developed a weapon capable of destroying the world. In her quest to find him, she encounters some weird and wonderful people and creatures and has some interesting adventures...Has all the ingredients of a b-grade movie: random, weird plot; haphazard direction; hammy acting. Yet somehow it is reasonably entertaining. The sheer energy and pace of the movie keep it from falling apart. Jane Fonda's looks and nonchalant-yet-effervescent performance help too.I imagine it worked even better when it was released. The movie was made at the height of psychedelia and it has the right ingredients to capture that zeitgeist: bright-colour-filled, fantastical, trippy sets and plot and free love. I would think that being high would be useful when watching this movie..Probably its most enduring legacy is that it gave the English New Romantic-genre band Duran Duran its name.