Barbarella (1968)

Official trailer

Roger Vadim directed, and the film is based on Jean-Claude Forest’s French comic series of the same name. John Phillip Law plays Pygar, a blind angel. Anita Pallenberg plays the Great Tyrant, Milo O’Shea plays Durand-Durand, David Hemmings plays Dildano and Marcel Marceau plays Professor Ping. The film made approximately three million dollars on a nine million dollar budget and was a commercial failure. The cult following developed across the later decades. I have a soft spot for this ridiculous movie. The plot is barely there and plenty of it is silly, but every time it cuts to a new set I sit up in my chair. I can’t think of another science fiction film from its era that’s this much fun to simply look at.

Barbarella is a 1968 artifact. The sexual politics are aggressively of their period. The visual design is psychedelic. The plot is structurally a picaresque, with Barbarella moving between distinct adventures held loosely together by the search for Durand-Durand. The film’s reputation as a sex symbol vehicle for Jane Fonda is the dominant cultural memory. The reputation is partly accurate and partly the result of decades of selective marketing.

The Visual Identity

The production design by Mario Garbuglia is the film’s most distinctive element. Each set is a fully realized fantasy environment with its own visual logic. The fur-lined spaceship. The labyrinth of mutant biology. The Sogo nightclub. The orgasmatron. The crystal mountain. None of the sets look like anything else in mainstream science fiction of the period. The film commits to its aesthetic with the kind of resources Hollywood was rarely committing to genre work in 1968.

The sets are the reason I’d watch it again. That fur-lined spaceship alone is worth the price of admission, and Durand-Durand’s Excessive Machine is so gloriously over the top that I can’t keep a straight face.

The costumes by Jacques Fonteray and Paco Rabanne are part of the film’s lasting image. Barbarella’s outfits across the runtime are individually memorable enough that some have become iconic on their own. The film’s costume design has influenced fashion shoots, music videos, and later science fiction productions for over fifty years.

The Sexual Politics

Its plot builds around Barbarella having sexual encounters with different beings in different environments. It plays the encounters as comedy, adventure, and occasionally drama. The film argues that future humanity has evolved beyond the need for guilt or restraint around sex. It delivers the argument through Barbarella’s willingness to engage with any partner who offers and her general lack of distress regardless of circumstances.

The sexual politics are aggressively 1968, in ways that have aged poorly and in ways that have aged interestingly.

The film is exploitative in its presentation of Jane Fonda’s body, and that part makes me wince; the camera ogles her in ways that feel cheap. It also argues for a sexual openness that was radical for the period, and it’s too odd a film to be written off as plain misogyny. I find the openness more interesting than the leering, but the leering costs it.

Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda was thirty during filming. She had been a major star since the early 1960s.

The role required her to be physically uninhibited in ways that would have damaged most American actresses’ careers in 1968. Fonda took the role and still built a career that ranks among the most respected of her generation. That’s partly her cultural moment and partly her own creative choices.

The performance is mostly committed. Fonda plays Barbarella as innocent instead of as a sexual sophisticate. The character responds to her partners’ interest with the polite friendliness she’d offer anyone. The reading is more interesting than the film’s marketing suggested. Fonda has spoken in interviews about her ambivalence about the film and her late-career discomfort with its objectification of her body. The discomfort is reasonable. The performance is still valuable.

I’m on Fonda’s side the whole way. Playing Barbarella as a polite innocent is a smart call, and it turns scenes that could have been a leer into a comedy of manners in outer space. I laugh with her far more than at her.

Does Barbarella still hold up?

7/10. I enjoy Barbarella a great deal, and I still can’t call it a good movie in the ordinary sense. The script wanders, the adventures run together, and the camera’s leering at Fonda is the kind of thing I’d have cut. What justifies the 7 is the design: Garbuglia’s sets and those costumes are so specific and so confident that a hundred later works have borrowed from them. Watch it as a gorgeous, dated, slightly embarrassing time capsule.

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