From: http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/arctfilmseason/barbarella.html

An extravaganza of gorgeous sets and sixties costume design at its most exuberant, shot with panache by Claude Renoir, provides the vibrantly imagined futuristic matrix for this tongue in cheek story of a woman's mission to save the galaxy from regressing into a primitive culture of war.

Jane Fonda creates simultaneously the prototype Barbie and the character of the sexually uninhibited, thoroughly competent female whom all males she encounters desire. Vadim seized the opportunity the relaxation of the Hays Code (which since 1922 had provided the guidelines for what was and was not acceptable in screen entertainment) gave film-makers, to adapt Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic strip - demonstrating cinema's ability to celebrate the Beautiful People, stimulating the pleasure centres through colour and sound in an odyssey through a world bounded only by imagination.

Terry Southern (who also wrote Dr Strangelove, Kubrick, GB 1963) here writes a script about Good and Evil, Power and Exploitation, Sharing and Caring in the techno-society, and the value of real emotional experience, physicality and sensuality in a world of plastics, drug-enhanced states and reflective surfaces.

The Evil City itself is constructed from areas defined by sheets of perspex and polythene, translucent or transparent, arranged in layers and tiers like an ancient citadel crossed with a 4-Dimensional maze. Antique monumental architectures combine with futuristic components to create an environment both hard-edged and sensuous. The materials are all rich and strange, as though produced through chemical processes, not grown in any environment resembling Earth, and the texturing is often achieved with light itself - warm hues infuse a sense of comfort into luxurious dwelling spaces or leisure areas, blues and greens irradiate the centres of corruption and powerplay.

The star cast of great actors renders the absurdity, wit and humour of his OTT characters with delight and precision, so that this film, which sends up everything from Paradise Lost to Flower Power, like all good graphic novel art, takes its own make-believe world seriously enough to carry the audience with it. Love, in the end, conquers all - and the audience gets to enjoy the physique of a blind male angel (who clearly is not on Barbarella's side for what he can see of her), as much as Barbarella herself in the famous gravity-free strip scene which raised the world's eyebrows. (3 years later, Fonda played Nora in Losey's film of Ibsen's Doll's House.)

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