by Roger Vadim, 1968.
Starring: Jane Fonda, David Hemmings, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Milo O’Shea, Anita Pallenberg, Ugo Tognazzi.
Rating: 10/10, 5/10.
Barbarella is definitely the film where a lot of things reached their peak. Deliberately non-realistic special effects. Stylish exploitation. Kitschily wonderful music. Old-style science-fiction sense of wonder. Self-satire. Stylized, over the top acting. All sorts of yummy things.
Plot: Barbarella (Fonda) is contacted by the President of the Solar System and told that a young scientist named Duran Duran (yes, this is where the band got its name) has gone missing in the uncharted regions of Tau Ceti. Unfortunately, he had with him the horrendous weapon known as the positronic ray, the first weapon outside the Museum of Conflict in centuries. Because Tau Ceti is unknown and unstable, this could lead to war. So Barbarella goes off to Tau Ceti to find him, crash lands, meets strange and interesting people, has sex with them, and...well...eventually does something, though whether it’s what she set out to do I’ll leave to you to find out.
The dialogue in the movie is fabulous. Take, for example, Barbarella’s conversation with the president, where, unable to deal with the possibilities of violence, she says that the Tau Ceti system might "still be in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility," that this situation might "mean archaic insecurity...selfish competition..." Or this exchange, when Duran Duran is explaining why he can never return to Earth (or "our own Earth planet," as Barbarella refers to it at one point), and Barbarella is in a slightly compromised position:
Duran Duran: I have learned truth and essence. I speak of the dignity, the nobility of pure evil!
Barbarella: Could you pass me some boots?
I’d like, too, to talk about some of those peaks I talked about before. The special effects in the film—I’m mostly talking about the views of space—are entirely, 100%, absolutely completely, unrealistic. At one point space looks like a blueish sort of sticky liquidy substance with suspended bubbles in it. And I’ve never actually BEEN that close to a sun, but I have a distinct feeling that that’s not what it would look like. And yet these effects all feel absolutely right. Though hokey (and hokeyness is one of the main joys of the movie), they convey the appropriate emotions of wonder, fear, and so forth.
When Jane Fonda was asked where her head was when she made this movie, she supposedly replied, "I don’t know—up my armpit, I guess. We all make mistakes." I suppose she’s talking about not just the so-called poor quality of the film, but more the also so-called exploitation in it, namely of Fonda by her then-husband, Roger Vadim. To which I say, ha! I don’t have any real logical defense of the exploitation, but somehow it fails to be offensive here. Maybe because no matter how naked, no matter how busy Barbarella gets, she always seems to have a sort of innocence, child-like wonder about her. And it’s so damned stylish, anyway, that it doesn’t really matter.
Speaking of stylish—can we talk about the music? The soundtrack is a masterpiece of late-sixties kitsch, a blend of Bacharach, pseudo-psychedelia, and pop bossanova (BPPPB) that only Europe in 1968 could produce. The score is great—particularly noticeable in the air battle scene and the scene where Barbarella meets the Black Queen in her throne room—but there are also four brilliant songs: "Barbarella," with the chorus that starts "Barbarella psychedela...", "Love, Love, Love Drags Me Down" which has a sort of BPPPB swagger, if such a thing is imaginable, and has the horn section you’d expect from a title like that, "I Love All The Love In You," which, odd as it might sound, I swear sounds just like an Elvis Costello ballad, and "An Angel Is Love," the triumphant number that plays over the closing credits. I could rave about this soundtrack (Which is ultra rare! Which I’ve seen going for over $75! Which I have! Which I got for $18.99! Thank you very much!) forever, but since I’m reviewing the movie and not the LP, I’ll move on.
Sense of wonder. Has everyone forgotten this but me and Roger Ebert? It’s what science-fiction is supposed to be all about, and yet we keep getting movies where the extraordinary is rendered ordinary, where, like Ebert says in his review of the remake of Planet Of The Apes, protagonists "never (seem) very surprised by anything that happens to (them)--like, oh, to take a random example, crash-landing on a planet where the apes rule the humans." Though of course this applies to everything, not just ape planets. There’s no wonder anymore. But Barbarella, she’s amazed by everything she sees, and frankly, so am I. When she steps out of her wrecked spaceship onto the vast icy plain, the landscape we encounter is so gorgeous, so alien, so wonderful, that (and forgive me for saying this about a Vadim-Fonda picture, which I know means trash coming and going) it gives me chills.
And there’s just all sorts of neat touches, like Barbarella’s spaceship, Alpha 7. It’s not just one of those sterile, white and cleanly spaceships like in Star Trek. It’s something I’ve never seen before—a personalised space vehicle. It only makes sense. She lives in it most of the time, why not make it her own? It’s covered inside with shag carpeting (which might make a comeback, suspend that disbelief), with that famous pointilist painting of people picnicking done up on the door, cushions everywhere. And on the outside, it’s pink!
There’s so much more to say, and yet this review is already so long. Anita Pallenberg as the Black Queen is quite likely the best part of the movie. She has this great, over-dramatic-but-sexy way of speaking where her voice is lower than James Earl Jones’s and a word like "doomed" can become three syllables long. And combine that with the BPPPB music and you’ve got a recipe for brilliance.
I love all the love in you. I do like the picture I see. Like looking at love looking lovely at me.
ps. The scene with the evil children in the crashed spaceship—is this or is this not the exact opposite of the Teletubbies? The Teletubbies are happy friendly alien children. These are evil murderous alien children. The Teletubbies live in their nice, cozy spaceship. These children live in the broken ruins of someone else’s crashed spaceship. The Teletubbies’ spaceship is in the middle of a pretty meadow. The children’s is in the middle of an icy wasteland. Where the Teletubbies live, there are lots of cute white bunny rabbits hopping around. The rabbits where the children live are scary-looking and black, and they don’t hop so much as creep. I don’t know what to make of this, but I think it’s great.