And you must give Barbarella<\/em> credit for letting you know, from its opening frames, exactly what you\u2019re in for: its credit sequence is a zero-gravity astronaut suit striptease, a heart-stopping combination of sexy and silly that serves as something of a mission statement for the 98 minutes to come. \u201cIt\u2019s a wonder \/ wonder woman \/ you\u2019re so wild and wonderful\u201d croons Bob Crewe, as the letters of Fonda\u2019s name, shaken from her luxurious mane of blond locks, fly across the screen. It\u2019s some of the best hair work of her career (which is saying something). Fonda continues to peel away to nothing through the sequence, an eyebrow-wiggling burlesque as letters land strategically (or not) for the rest of the credits; among them are acknowledgments of the producer (Dino de Laurentiis, the notorious showman and exploiteer) and director Roger Vadim, who co-wrote the script with Terry Southern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of the latter\u2019s filmography, Barbarella<\/em> has less in common with Dr. Strangelove<\/em> or Easy Rider <\/em>than his novel Candy<\/em> (whose film adaptation was released, like Barbarella<\/em>, in 1968) \u2013 an unapologetically horny chronicle of female sexual discovery and fulfillment. Those preoccupations made him an ideal match with Vadim, who had gained international notoriety a dozen years earlier with his directorial debut, And God Created Woman<\/em>, and spent his ensuing years further pushing the boundaries of on-screen sexuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also spent them meeting and marrying Jane Fonda, whose pairing with the controversial filmmaker and headlining of his films also served to effectively puncture the image she had forged in early-\u201860s pictures like Tall Story <\/em>and Period of Adjustment. <\/em>It wasn\u2019t that she played the goody-goody in those early films; she was never Doris Day, and there was some attempt at candor in these stories of young women coming to terms with the shifting sexual mores of the day. But her collaborations with Vadim went further, and by the time the pair arrived at Barbarella<\/em>, she had found a new variation of her onscreen persona: the wide-eyed sex bomb, aware of her comeliness but not of the pleasures it can unlock. It\u2019s a grinning, gleeful performance, in which both actor and character convey the thrill of being a good girl who enjoys being bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film that surrounds that performance is, to put it kindly, less compelling. Set in the distant future, when all war has been eradicated and love rules all, the plot concerns space adventurer Barbarella and her mission to find the missing inventor Durand Durand (who has invented a \u201cpositronic ray\u201d). Her orders? \u201cUse all of your incomparable talents to preserve the integrity of the stars and our mother planet.\u201d She\u2019s given this mission while still fully nude from that opening sequence, so \u201cincomparable talents\u201d is delivered with the appropriate elbows in the ribs; she certainly doesn\u2019t seem to be a super-spy, since the first leg of her rescue mission is disrupted by a bunch of children, who capture her and unleash an army of creepy dolls on her person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She\u2019s saved, however, by Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi), who suggests she thank him for the rescue in a rather direct way: \u201cWell, you could let me make love to you.\u201d And that\u2019s the crux of the picture \u2013 that \u201cnobody\u2019s done that for centuries\u201d because \u201cit was proved to be distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency,\u201d so sex evolved into a process involving harmonious \u201cpsycho-cardiogram\u201d readings (the writers of Demolition Man<\/em> were clearly Barbarella<\/em> fans). But once she gets a taste of the real thing, she finds she enjoys it, and the rest of the picture plays out in roughly the same fashion: Barbarella travels to a new planet, gets into trouble, wiggles her way out, has some sex, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fonda has, understandably, never treated Barbarella<\/em> as the crown jewel of her filmography \u2013 both due to its quality and a general bad aftertaste from the union with Vadim. But it\u2019s a genuinely skillful performance, a tricky role that she plays just right: with a grin, but not a wink, and a good actor knows the difference. She knows how to deliver the double entendre dialogue without going too broad (when she adjusts her speaking and hearing for different languages, she\u2019s matter-of-factly announces \u201cBetter adjust my tongue box\u201d), and her comic timing is superb; when she\u2019s asked \u201cAre you typical of Earth women?\u201d she waits a perfectly considered beat before responding, cheerfully, \u201cI\u2019m about average!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That cheerfulness is all over Barbarella<\/em>, which is set in the future but couldn\u2019t be more anchored in the culture of 1968 if its characters picked up Abbey Road<\/em> LPs on the way to the opening of Hair<\/em>. Everything in it is bubblegum and pop art and exposed skin, accompanied by a score chock full of wah-wah pedals and goofy basslines. It is not, strictly speaking, a good movie.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a wildly pleasurable one, and sometimes, especially these days, that\u2019s just as valuable. \u201cBarbarella\u201d is currently streaming<\/em> on the Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a> (as part of their<\/em> \u201cStarring Jane Fonda\u201d<\/em><\/a> program) and <\/em>on Amazon Prime Video<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/barbarella2-1024x614.jpg\")
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