Sex, space & celluloid kink: behind the scenes of ‘Barbarella’, the greatest softcore sci-fi ever made
To many sci-fi obsessives, Barbarella isn’t just a movie – it’s a freakshow monument carved into the tacky velvet wall of pop culture.
Released in 1968 and directed by Roger Vadim – French playboy, lover of Brigitte Bardot, and spiritual inventor of the horny auteur – this was the film that imagined the future not as chrome and steel, but as a surrealist nudie magazine with shag carpeting.
Starring Jane Fonda as the titular astronaut of love, Barbarella lands somewhere between Flash Gordon, a Russ Meyer flick, and a Paco Rabanne runway show…but just with more lube. This was before Star Wars bleached the weird out of sci-fi. Back when you could drop a million dollars to build sets that looked like an orgy exploded inside a kaleidoscope, and nobody asked why.
And then there’s the real dirt: the photos. These aren’t just your standard press junket stills; they’re visual proof that this film was made in a cloud of cigarette smoke, French ego, and loosely-contained chaos. In one, Vadim casually adjusts Fonda’s space corset while she stares into the middle distance like a woman who’s both entirely present and not at all surprised this is happening. Elsewhere, she’s feeding a child breakfast in thigh-high boots and silver nipple armour. Just another day at the office.
“Barbarella has no guilt about her body. I want to make something beautiful out of eroticism.”
Roger Vadim
You see costumes being duct-taped to flesh. Men in ape suits standing next to half-naked models. Fonda, expressionless in a fishbowl helmet, looks like she’s five seconds away from quitting. Vadim, always looking like a man who hasn’t slept since the French New Wave began, chain-smokes through takes and waves his arms like Federico Fellini’s pervier cousin. The whole thing feels less like a film set and more like a fever dream funded by Paramount.
The brilliance of Barbarella is that it shouldn’t work—and yet, it does. It’s nonsense. Pure, titillating, unfiltered nonsense. But it’s beautiful, too. This is what happens when you let Eurotrash fashion designers run wild with a Hollywood budget and no shame. The result is a cultural artefact so bizarre, so committed to its own perversions, that it ends up feeling – dare I say – kind of punk rock.
In these behind-the-scenes moments, you see the cracked genius behind the curtain. A film made by a man directing his wife to strip on camera while pretending it’s high art. A crew that probably never fully understood what they were building. A cast floating through mirrored sets like stoned mannequins. And Jane Fonda, trapped in the eye of the orgy-storm, radiating something oddly majestic.
Fifty years later, Barbarella still feels dangerous because no one has the guts to make anything this stupidly bold anymore.
Sci-fi babes and boys at their finest.
