1968: Barbarella

Barbarella (Vadim, 1968) 1/10

Who seduces an angel? Who strips in space? Who conveys love by hand? Who gives up the pill? Who takes sex into outer space? Who's the girl of the 21st century? Who nearly dies of pleasure? (Promotional Tagline)

In April, 1968 director Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey: an ingenious blend of celestial special effects and avant-garde narrative constructs. Planned and constructed over a number of years, the film's meticulous visuals are still some of the most remarkable and durable creations ever captured on celluloid. Time has fared well for Kubrick's creation. Six months later, another noted sci-fi film was released. Yet, unlike Kubrick's futuristic vision, time has not been kind to Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. In fact, time has been rather spiteful.

For all her successive achievements in films such as Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Alan J. Pakula's Klute and Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Jane Fonda has never been able to live down her most infamous performance as the title character in her then-husband Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. When recently asked where her head was when she agreed to play the title role of Jean Claude Forest's adult graphic novel, Fonda responded "I don't know- up my armpit."

Barbarella is arguably Jane Fonda's filmic "Hanoi Jane" moment: an error in retrospect and a blight on her career. And while her outspoken political views and notorious photograph perched upon a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun still bewilderingly anger Vietnam veterans, Barbarella has somehow shockingly become her most famous role.

Directed by French filmmaker Roger Vadim, Barbarella must have been a Sixties teenage nerd's cinematic "wet dream:" a ridiculously campy and trashy softcore sci-fi spoof filled with sexual innuendo, entendres and psychedelic imagery; essentially a sexed-up Star Trek parked outside an intergalatic bordello-cum-opium den. In the film, Jane Fonda stars as Barbarella, a 41st century century agent for the Republic of Earth asked by the President of Earth to track down missing scientist Duran Duran (Milo O' Shea) who is threatening the peaceful balance of the galaxy.

To the tune of the film's catchy psychedelic-lounge soundtrack, Barbarella begins with the film's infamous zero gravity strip. It is here that Vadim outlines the limited perspectives of Barbarella: a tongue-in-cheek film of risque images and bawdy space humour. Yet, the imagery produced in Claude Renoir's cinematography is hardly sexy or humourous. Instead the film is often offensively backward with feminist activist Fonda surprisingly playing a character that is neither strong nor rounded.

Instead Barbarella is a product of a mechanized future in which emotions and interactions are repressed through pills and robotic language. The inhabitants of other worlds are mocked for their savagery. Yet, this "living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility" is inherently sexualized, rather than fashioned through technological sources. Such is the development of the human race that intercourse is performed through narcotics, rather than intimate interaction. But while, Vadim could have suggested this as part of a larger problem of social detachment, instead he milks it for petty laughs.

After being rescued from a group of vile children, Barbarella's saviour, a man wearing a suit that appears to have once been a Wookie, asks her for sexual compensation. Yet, instead of using pills, the man pleasures sexually innocent Barbarella with genuine, "savage" intercourse. Naturally Barbarella enjoys it so much, that throughout the rest of the film, she struggles to keep the flimsy strands of her space lingerie on: exchanging pleasure for good deeds from Pygar (John Philip Law) a blind angel in a bird's nest and undressing in front of a half-brained revolutionary.

Yet, Barbarella's heterosexuality is always maintained, despite threats from Anita Pallenberg's bisexual tyrant The Black Queen. Pallenberg's repeated suggestions to sleep with Barbarella, become like the other running gags in the film, a tiresome bore. Vadim's continual attempts to illustrate the greatness of old-fashioned attitudes backfires in the film's liberalized sexuality. While espousing the rhetoric of "free love," Vadim also positions Barbarella as an ignorant nymphomaniac.

Despite being charged with a position of responsibility, Barbarella lacks intellectual acumen and personal independence. Continually throughout Barbarella, the title character spends more time wooing space creatures and emphasizing the extensiveness of wardrobe than planning a cunning operation to save the universe. Because of this, she repeatedly requires the assistance of men or masculinized women to aid her plight. In fact, the universe is saved not through her skill, but rather through male incompetence. Additionally, the film's metaphoric notion of "the pill" seems to dwell on an idea of a female character abandoning the real "pill" and returning to an atmosphere most suited to her lasvicious cartoon anti-feminism: the home.

These misogynistic attitudes continue in the routine instances of torture performed on the title character. The first involves a group of young children sending their mechanical dolls to attack her; the second has Barbarella placed in birdcage surrounded by hundreds of bloodthirsty Parakeets; and the third is a ridiculous organ-shaped erotic torture device that orgasms its victims to death. Each of these seem to place an emphasis on the persecution of women. Beginning in early childhood by learning maternal skills through dolls, women are restricted in their future social roles. The bird cage can be substituted for the domestic sphere with its minimal movement and lack of ability to roam, while the sexual torture performed by a sadistic male can be equated to notions of a woman's lack of sexual freedom.

Yet, the entire Barbie doll image Barbarella conjures up negates all of these with her perfectly primmed hair, wanton clothing and Valley Girl expressions. In a galaxy supposedly so refined and balanced that weapons have become museum artefacts and social harmony has been established, the images Barbarella represents and the attitudes she espouses belong in the dark ages. One even expects Fonda's character to inform the President of Earth to not "ask me, I'm just a girl." The blend of highbrow and countercultural ambitions the film routinely alludes to also fails through this methodolgy. This infuriating mix of art and trash in Barbarella is evident in its utilization of Dali-esque surroundings and Seurat's "Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette" along with shag-carpet lined spaceships and fur lingerie.

Produced by Italian mega producer Dino de Laurentiis, the film was a huge critical and commercial failure: essentially destroying the kitschy career of Roger Vadim and cementing Fonda as a late '60's sex symbol. Barbarella is arguably the most garish and vulgar piece of filmmaking produced during the late Sixties. Featuring antiquated models, matte paintings and disingenuous sets, Barbarella breathes a rusty air: a stale oxygen encoded in its haphazard plot and tedious dialogue that seven screenwriters including Forest, Vadim and famed wordsmith Terry Southern worked on.

A wicked synthesis of pornographic gluttony and 50's sci-fi settings, Barbarella fails were Federico Fellini's equally trippy and depraved 1969 film Satyricon succeeded. In Satryicon the grotesque characters are treated with distain and the otherworldly settings are filtered through conceptions of baseness.

Unlike in Fellini's Satryicon, Vadim's camera never allows the film's absurd surrealism to feel authentic. Instead Barbarella is trapped in a sleazy farcical homage that is retrograde in its approach and loose with its intentions. Buried under its layers of misogynistic and crass humour is a thematic anti-modernist message that slips out of focus.

Earlier in his career, Vadim was noted for extracting sexually intruiging performances from a slew of internationally renowed leading ladies. In the late '50's he brought Brigitte Bardot to international prominence in ...And God Created Woman and later Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Fonda. Yet, one cannot help think that Bardot would have been far better suited to the trashy, sex-drenched atmosphere Vadim's paean to equally rickety '50's B movies.

Under its present formula, Bardot's voluptuous figure could have easily filled out the pencil thin singular dimensons of a character Fonda appears reluctant and unable to play. Instead Fonda meanders with wooden expressions in response to such servile material. Such is the nature of Vadim's sex dirge that the cool swagger David Hemmings stood for in Antonioni's Blow-Up vanishes in his portrayal of a clumsy, leather and chain clad revolutionary.

Similarly, the menacing vampiric chic of Keith Richards' ex-Anita Pallenberg evaporates in an instant through the film's sprawling lack of focus. Even famed French mime Marcel Marceau, in a rare speaking role, becomes redunant as the faunish Professor Ping: a character representative of the film's lack of depth and range.

And it is this lack of intellectual, artistic or emotional sense that ultimately destroys Barbarella. Rather than create a powerful, countercultural woman able to relate the feminist rhetoric of the Sixties into the 41st century, director Roger Vadim creates an exploitative, cheap sexpot. Although adapted from Jean-Claude Forest's adult graphic novels, one wonders why Vadim didn't infuse notions of 20th century female social struggles and empowerment into the picture instead of sexually and intellectually regressive concepts of womenhood. An ugly and tasteless embarassment that surely must have offended second-wave feminists, it is easy to see why Jane Fonda has repeatedly attempted to distance herself from the project ever since.

But then again what were '60's audiences supposed to expect? After all she's only a girl.

* Barbarella is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque