National Post (National Edition)
The story behind BARBARELLA
TIME HAS BEEN KIND BOTH TO ACTRESS JANE FONDA AND HER WEIRDEST FILM
On a sound stage in Rome in 1967, director Roger Vadim was trying to persuade some birds to peck off his wife's clothes.
As intergalactic sex goddess Barbarella, Jane Fonda was locked in a giant cage and sentenced to death by hummingbird. The only problem? The birds weren't interested.
A ban on the export of hummingbirds from the United States forced him to substitute various birds who simply would not attack Barbarella. Instead, they defecated all over her. It took two weeks (during which Fonda was briefly admitted to hospital for extreme nausea) for Vadim to gather enough footage of the birds to cut together a convincing scene. In the film, just as Barbarella is about to succumb, a trap door opens beneath her, sending her sliding down a plastic tube into the arms of a handsome resistance fighter.
Barbarella is a sci-fi satire about a blissfully good-natured Earth warrior, her only weapon love, who travels to a distant planet to stop a villainous scientist from destroying Earth with his cosmic ray.
If that gives the impression of a plot, it's misleading. Barbarella is camp dressed up as science fiction. But it's saved by some brilliant set pieces. It's also elevated above shallow sexploitation by Fonda, who turns Barbarella into a fabulously deadpan comic creation.
In Fonda's filmography, Barbarella sticks out like a sore thumb, following comedies such as Cat Ballou and Barefoot in the Park. Fonda didn't want to make it at all, but, like her contemporaries Sharon Tate and Jean Seberg, she found herself in thrall to an overbearing, older European auteur.
As Vadim, her then-husband, put it in his 1986 memoir, Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda (Simon & Schuster): “I explained to Jane that the time was approaching when science fiction and galactic-style comedies like Barbarella would be important. She wasn't really convinced, but she realized that I had a passion for the project.”
The film's aggressive sexuality was daunting for Fonda.
Although she'd filmed nude scenes before, for Barbarella she had to embody the idea of a 1960s sex symbol. Having battled bulimia for much of her life, she was anxious about the costumes.
“She had to look perfect and was taking vitamins and having daily massages in addition to bingeing and purging,” Patricia Bosworth wrote in Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). “It was all part of her unhealthy routine to keep supremely fit.”
Vadim was assembling his cast, Blowup's David Hemmings and Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg. What he didn't have was a script, a problem not solved by his excessive drinking. Seven screenwriters were eventually credited and the shoot was interrupted by rewrites.
But the script was the least of Fonda's worries. In one scene, she was strapped into an “orgasm machine” that malfunctioned and caught fire. And sliding down plastic tubes all day in minimal outfits gave the star a severe belly rash.
The shoot was made more hellish by a love triangle between Fonda, Vadim and her controlling ex-lover, theatre director Andreas Voutsinas. Discovering Voutsinas was short of money, Fonda asked Vadim to hire him as voice coach for Pallenberg. It didn't end well: Pallenberg's lines were eventually dubbed.
On its release in 1968, Barbarella was greeted with grim reviews, one critic referring to it as “2001: A Spacey Idiocy.” Fonda turned her back on both film and marriage, divorcing Vadim in 1973, and immersed herself in politics.
Barbarella has become a cult classic. Fonda herself has a conflicted relationship with the film. “I'm not real,” she told an interviewer in 1978. “It's like my voice is coming out of my ear. My own alienation comes at me through the film.”
She struggled with its reputation as a misogynist exploitation movie, particularly as a feminist. As she wrote in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far (Random House): “Women asked questions like, `How did you feel doing Barbarella? Did you feel you were being exploited?' I could tell I was supposed to feel exploited, but secretly I thought: No one forced me to make the film. I didn't enjoy it very much for lots of reasons, but I didn't feel exploited.”
But Fonda has since come around to its merits, praising its ambition, even wishing it were sexier. In 2011, she revealed she'd love to star in a remake, but on her own terms. “Instead of being someone from this very evolved planet that comes to this backward, evil planet,” she said, “I would have brought them true intimacy. I would have taught them how to really make love. When they put me into that machine that was supposed to kill me by orgasm, instead of being kind of scared and everything, I should have just gotten in and laughed. `No question I'm gonna blow the fuse!'”