Revolutionary in its time, and still highly regarded today, it is an attack on good visual taste and brings a very stupid story.
There are films that stand out because they are really very good, for the high quality of the production, the work of the actors and the story that is told. But a film doesn't become popular or iconic just for that... there are films that are so admittedly bad and strange that, in a way, they become remarkable and enter the so-called popular memory or collective memory. Barbarella is a film inspired by a 60's comic book, and both the original material and the film itself were very influenced by the “hippie” culture, the libertarian ideas of May 68 and the Sexual Revolution. It was a time when eroticism became popular and massively sought after and exploited by the arts. Only if we understand this can we understand why this film is the way it is.
Despite doing justice to the source material, the script tells a story so fanciful and idiotic that only someone from that time could appreciate it: Barbarella is (I really don't want to have to take this stereotype, but it's blatant) a dumb blonde, immensely attractive, who is sent by Planet Earth to another galaxy, in search of a lost scientist and the weapons he had. She comes into contact with various aliens and is almost always seduced or "convinced" into having sex. At a certain point, she becomes involved in a rebellion against a queen of a perverse city, where they try to kill her in a machine that causes an "overdose" of sexual pleasure. Obviously, this fails, and the movie ends with the blonde astronaut winning.
I didn't see sex scenes in the film, but the character appears half-naked many times, which then was truly revolutionary – almost pornographic. For us, the way she is seduced is so clearly misogynistic that in some cases it would be a crime, and it's hard for me to think that the film was so calmly received, but those were other times. If this film were released now, without a doubt, it would be so controversial for its sexist sexuality that I think the feminist movements would boycott it. Also, the dialogues, the situations and the whole concept of the movie are pretty dumb.
The film was a French-American production and a good part of the cast is French-speaking, and I would like to highlight, on the positive side, the participation of the great Marcel Marceau, in a small but relevant speaking role. The director was Roger Vadim, and then he was married to the actress and sex symbol Jane Fonda, who, thus, secured the protagonist role. For future memory exist the statements, by the actress and the director, about Fonda's insecurity about herself and the way she didn't feel comfortable with the character and her nudity. Even so, and despite everything, Fonda did what she could with the terrible material she was given. We can still positively highlight the contributions of John Phillip Law and Anita Pallenberg.
Technically, the film stands out for its futuristic “trash” scenography, evident, for example, in the protagonist's ship and in the city of Sogo. It can be visually horrible, an attack on good taste or logic, but back then it was something quite avant-garde, as were the costumes, particularly Barbarella's sexy spacesuits (which could almost be used as bathing suits). The rest is pretty bad: the cinematography is boring and dull, the camera work is average, the soundtrack is kitsch.