Review of Barbarella (1968) by Allen I — 21 May 2009

There's a reason things become cult classics and not classic-classics. Often, this is simply because they are [i]very[/i] bad. Oh, sometimes, it's because the world is not really ready for them, or because they're good but only appeal to a select audience. It happens. By and large, though, they're just really bad. I mean, painfully bad. To get into them means to be part of a select group. I mean, anyone can get into movies that are good, right? To become part of a group into a movie that's bad, well, that sets you apart from everyone else. And that's why people still watch [i]Barbarella[/i], I think. Admittedly, part of the thing for me--and I suspect for a lot of other people--is the fact that Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea) gave his name to Duran Duran ('80s electropop band). But I don't plan to watch it again, and there are some people who will just watch this over and over and over again.

Bear with me--this doesn't make any sense. Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is sent by the President of Earth (Claude Dauphin) to the planet SoGo in order to . . . capture, I think? Anyway, find the escaped scientist, I think, Durand Durand. She crashes onto an ice field--they call it an ice forest, but no trees--and encounters weird little demon children. She is saved from them by Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi), who will fix her ship in return for making love. She thinks it's the Earth-style, sophisticated, pharmaceutical version, but he introduces her to real physicality, something she had been taught was barbaric. He kind of but not really fixes her ship, and she ends up in the Labyrinth with blind angel Pygar (John Philip Law) and his master, Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau--really), and they get her to the city, and she meets the Concierge (O'Shea), who takes her to The Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg, voiced in English by Joan Greenwood--the aunt from [i]The Moonspinners[/i]!), and stuff happens, and she breaks some sex/death machine, and stuff happens. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense.

This is another one of those ridiculous drugged-up movies that people are trying to imbue with deep, symbolic meanings. I just can't go there. It's silly. Jane Fonda strips naked in the opening credits, and there isn't much interest in anything but getting from one sex scene to another after that. I suppose you could work something out about what it says about the Sexual Revolution or something. I don't know. I guess the thing could be seen as a parable about repression, except not, because Barbarella is the good girl, and the decadent culture she submits to is clearly supposed to have strong advantages over the society of Earth, only the decadent culture is also evil. If it's trying to be a parable, it should have gotten its story straight.

Mostly, I think, it is a string of simply pointless segues between images of sexuality. There's even a brief segment where a group of scantily-clad women--is there any other kind in this movie?--sit around and consume "essence of man," which seems to be water that a scantily-clad man is swimming in. If there is something more to the scene than that, I don't know what it is. Essence of men? Yeah, I got nothing. And Jane Fonda changes clothes about fifteen times over the course of the movie, even though she does not seem to have brought any changes with her to the city. She even has at least three pairs of boots. Pygar just runs--well, flies--around in a little loincloth, and The Great Tyrant has an eyepatch in some scenes and not in others. Marcel Marceau gets a little drinking glass thing that he sticks to his forehead. It's a cornucopia of random.

I have said, of late, that there are some movies you just have to watch if you're going to consider yourself a film buff. I have also, of course, said that you only really need to watch them once. I've seen [i]Goodfellas[/i] once, and I'm done. Ditto [i]Barbarella[/i]. Jane Fonda has been in some better films--though the stuff she's done in the last few years, since coming out of retirement, seems to be universally crap. She seems to now regret having done this movie while Mia Farrow took the offered role in [i]Rosemary's Baby[/i]. (I'm glad she did, too; Mia Farrow did a great job.) I've only seen one of her other movies, and that some time in the '90s, but I look forward to seeing more of them just to find out if she can actually act.