Roger Vadim
Barbarella

There is no rational reason when you fall in love. There is no evaluation of a person's strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons. Something happens. And - as a girl once told me - you look at each other and there are like little stars sparkling in that person's eyes. Who in turn sees the little stars in your eyes.

This also applies to movies, and film characters. You fall in love with them. And Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, is certainly not a masterpiece. It is not poetry, it is just the adaptation of a comic set in a very distant and improbable future where the usual battle between good and evil takes place. The film itself is a pop comic, very sixties (after all, it's from 1968). And I must say that from a certain point on, it loses its rhythm and is also a bit boring.

She, Jane Fonda at her maximum splendor, is beautiful, and the opening credits with Bob Crewe's music are the most charming striptease I can recall.

Barbarella, then, doesn’t do anything particularly edifying. Like accepting to make love with anyone who asks her, even to get information that helps her in the search for the insane and evil scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea).

Dildano (David Hemmings) is quite silly in wanting to try to make love with her using a modern little pill that involves the relationship consuming by placing hand against hand rather than the traditional way (eh, he didn't want to do it like the savages of the planet Sogo, it was an opportunity he had been waiting a lifetime for!), the latter way which Barbarella had just discovered with a very hairy Ugo Tognazzi.

Pygar (John Phillip Law), the blind angel, obviously semi-naked, who could no longer fly, and who in a certain scene almost looks like Saint Sebastian just before the martyrdom, is not a character to get lost over, not even when he regains his flying abilities. He is rather expressionless, but on the other hand, how can a blind angel express anything?

Anita Pallemberg, the black queen, is a stunner (and a couple of Stones knew it well). She wants to seduce the protagonist but probably takes the wrong approach.

Yet she, Barbarella, captivated me. Right from those opening credits. And then when she ends up in the excessive machine with which Durand Durand wants to torture her and kill her with pleasure. That any person would die from that torture, unable to endure such treatment with their load of inhibitions. But she destroys the machine because she lives this thing as an experience, does not reject, explores. And wins.

Or when, initially amazed by Tognazzi's request - who plays a strange rather wild guy living solitary in the ice - to make love the old-fashioned way (a thing so little... orthodox when years of progress had led research to discover the pill for syncrovuluties that guaranteed results that the traditional way didn't ensure!): she experiments though, completely changing her mind (just look at how she hums after, lying among the furs!).

Or when, to blend in with the bad guys, she tastes the essence of male: a huge hookah where in the liquid of the transparent vase there is a young half-naked boy doing aquatic exercises

Not the soaked man Franco Cerri, around those same years. This one has no shirt and tie, no stains to wash. Could this be what makes the difference? She inhales and seems to find this thing interesting. But she doesn't get carried away, she's just curious about everything.

Curious and, in her curiosity, clean, not morbid. Not perverse. To me, she is a true heroine.