BARBARELLA

Jane Fonda is Barbarella. And Barbarella is a guilty pleasure.

A camp, euro chic, swinger sixties one. The proof that a movie doesn't need to be too good to be liked.

A movie with characters named Duran Duran or Dildano, Professor Ping or Stomoxis.

It's a crazy psicodelic trip directed in 1968 by Roger Vadim (born Roger Vladimir Igorevich Plemyannikov) the über lucky man that married Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda and made a kid to Catherine Deneuve.

The three times lucky Roger Vadim

Our heroine keeps falling to the floor and getting her beautiful clothes destroyed by lovely flesh eater parakeets ("This is a much too poetic way to die", she says on the matter) or iron tothed little dolls (Clack! Clack!). Making love to angels, silly literally underground rebels, bitchy queens wearing plastic horns, one "excess machine" that will kill you of pleasure, hairy child slave hunters (actually the children, are all cruel twins that torture Barbarella for fun so i guess they have it coming). Actually she makes love to everyone that saves her life.

Is not a serious movie unless you can take seriously a password like : "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobbwllllantysiliogogogoch".

Barbarella is not just a pretty face, even if the Great Tyrant (that's the queen with the plastic horn) keeps calling her "Pretty-Pretty", because she could the password after hearing it only once!. She is very realistic, like when the queen says to her:

-"Vade retro, Earth girl! I know you don't really exist"

She answers, "That maybe true, Your Majesty, but let's just stick to what we see".

In this french-italian Dino De Laurentis production we get a great international cast. Americans John Philip Law (the tanned blond blind angel Pygar) and Fonda, italians Ugo Tognazzi (the hairy hunter Mark Hand) and Anita Pallenberg ( famous, amoung other things for her romances with Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger), french mime master Marcel Marceau (as professor Ping), british David Hemmings (as the clumpsy rebel Dildano) and Milo O'Shea (Durand-Durand) among others.

A guilty pleasure because it can gets you disturbed while making you smile, Barbarella is a cult movie that displays the beauty of Jane Fonda spiced with a series of fantastic outfits made by a costume design team headed by no less then Paco Rabanne. Through the years and long before I saw the movie for the first time, in the mid nineties, I was fascinated for the pics of Fonda from this film. And today I gonna share with you, Guelylanders, the whole dossier!

Let's add that Fonda made this movie instead of making Rosemary's Baby and Bonnie & Clyde. She regrets it. But I think that is lucky for us, Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway.

I happen to dig the catchy swinging songs performed by The Glitterhouse as well (at the end of this entry)