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Barbarella rides a wavering line between campy sexploitation and artful, inspired cult classic. It's an encapsulation of the wildness of the 60's, the thought experiment of guilt-free or post-sexuality of the distant future, wild sets and imagery, and a weird earnestness from Fonda playing the innocent, who bounces from situation to situation with wide-eyed wonder, drawing the viewer in to experience it all alongside her (though 'innocent' is an unlikely word here). It is a futuristic fetishy fashiony fairy tale, wonderfully and weirdly unique, and we will never see its like again. It was one of those right-time right-place right-people filmings. Any attempt to remake it would probably trod heavily over the line in one or another direction - too campy, too much focus on the sexual element, visuals that are garish without the cohesive vision. The plot is admittedly choppy, and feels cheap at times, but it's almost like that's part of the fun, an episodic fever dream. It's easy to see its artistic influence on subsequent 'wild comic-book future' movies like The Fifth Element and Valerian, and a lot of campy sci-fi music videos. The acting is delightful to me - digging into the roles with abandon, without overt winks about how over the top it is. Marcel Marceau has his first speaking role. John Phillip Law as a rigidly insane blind birdman/angel. Pallenberg/Greenwood combining to give the Black Queen role shades of seduction and death simultaneously. And Fonda, who surfs seemingly effortlessly across the top of the waves. It's not even that I love this movie and others hate it or don't understand it or lump it in with sensationalist schlock - I just mourn that there aren't more movies that come close to what this one does.
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Jan 3, 2024 06:19
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 20:02 |
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