Barbarella is the sort of movie that was infamous in my junior high. It was infamous everywhere, really, but I was a pubescent boy amongst many other pubescent boys and the film got a lot of talk. between us. This would have been the late 1980s. It seems strange to me now that 13-year-old boys would be talking about a movie made more than a decade prior. It must have come out on home video or been playing a lot of HBO or something.
At the time Jane Fonda was known more for her exercise videos than her movies. I didn’t get to see the movie. To be honest I don’t know if any of my friends did. But there was this buzz about it. Jane Fonda had a nude scene in it and was all kinds of sexy. That’s what we talked about.
The film was notorious outside of my junior high for those reasons as well. In 1969 Fonda was a well-established movie star. Barbarella was a sexy, cheesy sci-fi flick directed by her husband Roger Vadim. Critics didn’t know what to make of it (they mostly didn’t like it) and audiences didn’t know what to do with it (they mostly didn’t watch it). But everybody talked about it, even a decade later.
It has remained on my cinematic radar ever since. But until this week I’d stayed away from it. The film has a reputation for being notoriously bad and campy fun. Now that I’ve seen it that’s pretty much how I’d describe it.
It is not by any means good cinema. But it is deliriously entertaining. The set design is magnificent and the costumes are outrageous. It looks like psychedelic cotton candy. The story is ridiculous and everybody but Jane Fonda seems to be phoning it in, but gosh I had fun watching it.
Set in the faraway future Barbarella the film stars Jane Fonda as Barbarella the character, who is tasked by the President of the Earth to find Durand Durand, a scientist who has created a psionic ray. Now in this future violence has been eliminated and sexual hangups have gone bye-bye. Barbarella is a groovy chic who hangs out in her shag-carpeted spaceship digging on cool tunes and having a good time.
But now she has a job to do. She flies to the planet Tau Ceti to save Earth from destruction. There she has lots of crazy adventures including having sex with an angel, being locked in a cage and attacked by birds, and attached to a machine designed to make her orgasm to death.
It never takes itself too seriously, it looks amazing, and mostly it is a lot of fun. It does run a little too long (technically it is only 98 minutes in length but it feels a lot longer) and there is a very little to it. I can’t see myself returning to it often. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t imagine it will entice me again anytime soon.
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