Jeremy Clarke reviews

Barbarella

Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

Cat. No: PLFEB 35201

Cert: 15

Running time: 94 minutes

Sides: 2 (CLV)

Year: 1968

Pressing: UK, 1996

Chaptered: YES

Sound: Mono

Widescreen: 2.35:1

Price: £19.99

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Director:

Roger Vadim

Starring:

Jane Fonda
John Phillip Law
Anita Pallenberg
David Hemmings
Marcel Marceau
Ugo Tognazzi

Long before Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire there was Jane Fonda in Barbarella - and long before Jane Fonda became The Most Politically Correct Actress Ever, she appeared in this wonderfully tacky SF illustration romp for then husband/director Roger Vadim (who’d achieved earlier notoriety doing much the same for Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman).

It’s a patchy firmament of a film studded with moments, ideas and occasionally even entire scenes of brilliance, passing through lots of truly terrible bits in between. But with the passing years, its mixture of psychedelic art direction, astounding costumes, sci-fi set pieces and broad sexual comedy feel have earned it richly deserved cult movie status. And now Pioneer have had it digitally remastered and put out on laserdisc in widescreen.

Perfunctory plot set in 40,000 AD (as conceived through a 1968 hallucinatory haze) has five-star, double-rated astronavigatrix Barbarella (Fonda) sent by Earth’s President to find vanished scientist Duran Duran (in case you wondered where that name came from), last seen in the vicinity of Tau Ceti.

Crash-landing her ship, our heroine runs into a series of characters and engages in sex with some of the male ones (both 40000 and 1968 being eras of free love and 'guns into ploughshares'). Humour derives from future/contemporary sex practices - involving holding hands, swallowing pills and both partners hair standing on end - and the more (pointless, she presumes) outmoded methods into which Barbarella is persuaded, only to learn in the process that those methods had something after all. "But," she comments blandly, "I can certainly see why people considered them distracting."

Other highlights include midgets with cannibal dolls, a very bad rip-off of The Birds’ attic attack using budgies, a flying angel whose eyes have been burned out and the Matmos, a sentient liquid living underneath a decadent city gorging itself on the evil of the citizens living above it.

Although the spaceships aren’t up to much and some elements (e.g. O’Shea’s electronic piano destined to pleasurably torture young women to death) look distinctly cheap, others - for instance the glass/crystalline interior surrounding the chamber of dreams above the Matmos - are at once stunning and exactly the sort of imagery that laserdisc serves so well.

Some incredibly eclectic casting - the veteran Marceau in his first speaking role, the bumbling revolutionary Hemmings, Pallenberg’s simultaneously seductive and menacing vamp queen constantly muttering "pretty, pretty", the cheerfully Irish O’Shea and, above all, Law’s angel - provides the perfect foil to Fonda as she walks in and out of a series of stunning costumes, unmatched anywhere else in the movies, throwing away deadpan dialogue in a strangely affecting manner. Even nearly thirty years after the film was made.

Despite the transfer being from an old print - at one point a tear in the film (one single frame) has been lovingly put back together and occasional sparkle is noticeable on the image - both colours and widescreen image look glorious. If you’ve seen the pan-and-scan version on TV, you’ll probably remember the wonderful opening, weightless airlock striptease sequence in widescreen before the picture zooms in irritatingly to full screen.

The rest of the film, however, looks equally startling in its original aspect ratio. Amazing establishing shots of crashed spacecraft jostle with (as a sort of perverse delight) some of the worst back projection special effects ever committed to film in Pygar the Angel’s flying scenes.

There aren’t all that many chapters (just under twenty in total), but they start and end in all the right places. Great side change as Barbarella goes down a chute (flip while disc changes sides) and comes out of a tunnel at the bottom.

However, at 94 minutes, it’s a shame the second side couldn’t have been in CAV (even though that would probably have nuked the superb side change). No stereo mix was ever made, so the disc’s in mono (with some very dated-sounding music). A real mixed bag of a film, then, in which the many highs outweigh the many lows and make it a cult item you’ll want to watch again and again in years to come. In short, despite the average overall verdict, it’s an ideal film for laserdisc, which, even without a side in CAV, comes highly recommended - especially given the £19.99 price tag.

Film 3/5
Picture 4/5
Sound 3/5

Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1996.