Barbarella 4K

We were primed for Arrow’s exhaustive extras for Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, as we always thought the story behind Jane Fonda’s far-out / flaky Sci-fi romp would outshine the film itself. Early reviews and Playboy magazine suggested that the film’s shoot must have been a 24-7 full-on party.

By 1968 standards Jean-Claude Forest’s bande-dessinée comic book Barbarella bordered on pornography, and was largely unknown on our Puritan side of the Atlantic.  What was Paramount thinking when it gave producer Dino De Laurentiis the green light to make two features based on unfamiliar continental comic strips?  Before Barbarella came to our local theaters we had already grabbed the soundtrack album with the provocative poster. Nothing forewarned us about its title sequence, with the sexiest opening credits we’d ever seen.

Presumably galvanized by the success of TV’s reboot of Batman, De Laurentiis went comic-book crazy. He engaged Italy’s Mario Bava to bring the Giussani sisters’ anarchist fumetti Diabolik to the screen. Bava stuck to his intimate, small scale production habits and used only a fraction of the budget allotted by the big-time Italian producer. The French filmmaker Roger Vadim was deemed a good choice for the oversexed adventures of a female Buck Rogers saga; his Paris-based production became a bottomless money pit.

Vadim is of course most noted for launching his first wife Brigitte Bardot as an international sex star. The tangled irony is that the original Barbarella comic strip character was supposedly based on Brigitte Bardot. The single-minded Vadim promoted two more major actress/wives post-Bardot, Annette Stroyberg and Jane Fonda. He married each of them in turn, and tried to mold them into Bardot’s image as well.

The Positronic Ray!

Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is a liberated, sex-obsessed space adventuress in a spoofy, Camp fantasy future — the year 40,000. Accepting a mission from Earth’s President Dianthus (Claude Dauphin), she proceeds to the planetoid Tau Ceti to find the lost scientist Durand-Durand (Milo O’Shea) and retrieve his ultimate weapon, the Positronic Ray. Barbarella discovers that Tau Ceti’s capital Sogo is ruled by The Great Tyrant, a.k.a. the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg). Her army of Black Guards terrorizes the miserable inhabitants of The Labyrinth, a Dante-esque hellscape. The curious scientist Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau) is the wisest man in The Labyrinth. Are you taking notes?

Episodic detours await our dauntless blonde space cadet. Barbarella is aided/seduced by two men, the hairy space hermit Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi) and the clumsy revolutionary Dildano (David Hemmings). She also finds a noble ally & bedmate in Pygar, a blind angel complete with enormous feathered wings (John Phillip Law). Upon entrance to the evil city of Sogo, Barbarella is subjected to erotic torture in the Excessive Machine. The insane Durand-Durand then activates his Positronic Ray in a bid to overthrow the Black Queen. The Black Queen wants to sleep with Barbarella as well. Trapped with her in her inviolable Chamber of Dreams, The Queen opts for an apocalyptic, suicidal act: she frees from its underground chamber a living liquid called The Mathmos, which will dissolve and destroy the entire planet.

That synopsis suggests that Barbarella could do with an extra-big helping of not-yet-invented Star Wars– grade visual effects. It gets colorful cinematography from Vadim’s frequent collaborator Claude Renoir, but the otherwise stage-bound production mostly relies on flimsy theatrical effects. The depiction of Mark Hand’s ice planet tells it all – the set is an ice skating rink with a dull cyclorama for a background. Production designer Mario Garbuglia (Rocco e i suoi fratelli,  Il gattopardo) comes up with some arresting, dynamic settings. But Roger Vadim doesn’t film them well, and his overall visual approach makes little attempt to express the dynamism of comic strip art. The movie has its moments, yet remains somewhat shapeless, with no editorial strategy. A better title might have been ‘It’s a Barbarella happening, Baby!'”

Huh . . . our first taste of Free Love.

Characterizations must carry everything. Jane Fonda is excellent as Barbarella, a spirited space-flake in a series of revealing costumes. Barb is a male fantasy slightly inverted, a Little Annie Fanny of the cosmos but a with a female-empowering core. Ms. Fonda feigns concern, arousal and confusion with an open-faced innocence. Her seduction scenes are okay, and she has a flair for off-color farce. Prime among these is the Excessive Machine, an automatic masturbation device that Milo O’Shea plays like a church organ. One of the few scenes that’s actually funny is a sex encounter shared by Fonda and David Hemmings. They engage in Futuristic lovemaking by simply taking a pill; sitting motionless, they experience orgasms while their joined fingertips generate smoke.

The disc extras remind us of a New York film critic’s (Amos Vogel’s?) scathing review, which said that Barbarella is artistically worthless in comparison to Mike Kuchar’s underground movie Sins of the Fleshapoids — from which it stole the sex-through-fingertips idea.

That said, both Fonda and Vadim do very well in comparison to their lifeless episode in the horror portmanteau Histoires Extraordinaires. Ms. Fonda had her first child with Vadim but did not become his permanent muse. A year later, she was back in Hollywood pursuing acclaim with more conventional dramatic roles. She also found time to wax political with Jean-Luc Godard and the North Vietnamese.

“An angel does not make love, an angel is love.”

Critics assumed that Barbarella was a stumble for Fonda, when in reality she carries the picture well, and retains her dignity. The best material places Fonda opposite John Phillip Law’s gentle, sightless Pygar, a mellow-yellow angel who talks like a Zen fortune cookie. When the time comes to fend off a buzzing horde of enemy airships, Pygar carries Barbarella aloft so she can shoot them down with her ray gun. The impossibly pure Pygar is a nice contrast with Law’s concurrent Diabolik character, a stylish master thief.

Marcel Marceau isn’t given much of interest to do, and Italo star Ugo Tognazzi was mostly wasted on American audiences unaware of his fame. The third distinctive characterization is Anita Pallenberg’s Black Queen of Sogo, the high priestess of a futuristic Sodom & Gomorrah. The Queen wears an eye patch and an abbreviated leather jumpsuit cut for maximum perversity. She spins a pair of knife-weapons in her palms. All she needs to complete the illusion of Black Widow is a red hourglass on her stomach. For additional velvety menace, Pallenberg is dubbed by the British actress Joan Greenwood (Kind Hearts and Coronets,  Mysterious Island), whose melodic, throaty voice registers somewhere between a growl and a purr:

“Hello my pretty pretty.”

Barbarella manages some interesting scenes, even if most look better in stills. For one tableaux of Barb’s crashed spaceship, an entire soundstage is transformed into an impressive rocky outcropping. The entrance into the City of Sogo sustains a nice sense of menace — unsavory denizens peer at Barb and Pygar from all sides, on a multi-level set. Once captured, Pygar is crucified with nails driven through his wings. The writers insure that Barbarella is placed in a compromised situation at least once in every reel, preferably something fetishistic. First comes an attack by a squad of unconvincing metal-toothed dolls. Not much later, she’s menaced by hundreds of pecking parakeets and finches . . . you know, the dreaded Melanie Daniels enhanced interrogation technique.

Us teenagers hoping for space warfare a la George Lucas have to settle for some tame action scenes. A few airships explode and a number of Black Guards are blasted apart, but only in static cutaways. Our hopes are raised when Barbarella, cornered in Sogo, grabs the Black Queen by her neck and threatens to melt her face with a ray pistol. But similar material is staged better in the old Buster Crabbe serial Flash Gordon.

Depending on viewer expectations, the expensive visual effects are ‘artificially quaint,’ ‘Camp’ or just plain tacky. The all-dissolving ‘Mathmos’ below Sogo will bring back memories of Lava Lamps.   The lamps have a weird Barbarella connection — the UK lighting company that first marketed lava lamps in 1963 was inspired by the Jean-Claude Forest comic books, as is proven by its name.  →

Excepting the main titles and credits, the film has few if any standard optical composites. The most prominent and noteworthy effect is big-scale Front Projection, utilized for the flying sequences, the Queen’s Chamber of Dreams, and the living liquid of the Mathmos. The pulsing psychedelic imagery is exactly like the big overhead-projector light-shows that were a standard feature at rock concerts. Specialist Charles Staffell had just accomplished excellent FP work for the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, a Space Odyssey.

Unsolicited effects errata: Front Projection doesn’t look like traditional rear screen process shots. It’s not difficult to spot: the projected images tend to have lighter contrast than the live-action placed before the screen. Since Scotchlite FB material was manufactured in narrow rolls, the large reflective screens constructed for filming were patchworks. This becomes clear in Pygar’s first flying sequence, against light clouds — the distinct pattern of patched FP material detracts from the effect.

The Zero Gravity Strip Tease.

Topic A for Barbarella fandom has long been Jane Fonda’s shining hour as an exhibitionist. Floating in apparent zero gravity to the airy music & lyrics of Bob Crewe and Charles Fox, Barbarella shucks off her space helmet and suit to reveal a free-floating nude body. Maurice Binder’s animated credit titles flit to and fro, failing to censor Ms. Fonda’s nether regions. We first saw the movie at a theater at Norton Air Force Base, with predictably enthusiastic applause from an audience of servicemen. Were homesick soldiers in Vietnam tormented by screenings of Barbarella?  The poor guys — stuck fighting a war while the home front exploded with Free Love.

The film’s only truly inspired montage cutting occurs here, filling the Panavision frame with Vadim’s approximation of a space age wet dream. The weightless illusion was accomplished in-camera: Vadim simply shot downward at Jane Fonda writhing atop a large sheet of Plexiglas. Helping out is that bouncy title tune:

“Barbarella psychedella, there’s a kind of cockleshell around you . . .”

So why did Barbarella not inspire critical praise or become a massive hit?   Vadim stages a lot of kinky tableaux — “it’s a happening!” — but only occasionally finds a good angle for his camera. When more than two people are on screen he just stays wide, trying to take it all in. The vibe is more Pageant than Comic Book. Cutaways to miniatures, effects, explosions, etc., feel disconnected.

We can still appreciate much of the art direction and cleverly designed props. Some of Jane Fonda’s costumes are appealing, with their plastic see-through breastplates and other erotic details. But some of the ‘far out’ sets are little more than collections of plastic balloons and clear plexiglass. The film’s margins are packed with exotic models in weird makeups and wholly impractical ‘futuristic’ garb — like one might have seen on a 1968 fashion runway.

The bottom line is that the talented comedienne Jane Fonda needed better direction. Twelve years later Dino de Laurentiis committed himself to another comic book space opera, Flash Gordon. Once again the result disappointed, but for opposite reasons. Dino’s production team created a lavish pop-art look and Mike Hodges’ direction is reasonably inventive and dynamic . . . but the actor in the leading role didn’t measure up.