Barbarella reux

A re-make of Barbarella, to be produced by Martha di Laurentiis, is in the planning with the writers of Skyfall attached to the project.

Having spent along day with Vadim and Jane Fonda at her farm-house near Paris during a break in shooting (have forty-five years really passed?) Barbarella was more than just a movie I enjoyed at the cinema. Jane I had first encountered back in 1961. And I had also got to know Anita Pallenberg slightly.

Nobody involved in that project would deny that it was meant to reflect and even provoke the sexual liberation of the newly permissive sixties.

But the remake is meant for television? For American television?.

I find the following very valid comment by Mark Wilson on about.com...

"Translating Barbarella's sexually revolutionary stance into the present day would be pointless without reorienting her in what would now be a similarly provocative direction. By our standards the actual physical sensuality expressed in either the comic or the film is relatively mild: what's shocking about her is the kinds of choices unavailable then and taken for granted now. The challenge is that to be true to the character and the concept, today's Barbarella must be shocking to us. If the new series results in just a character that's sexually open in a way that 1968 found provocative but 2012 does not, is she really Barbarella?"

And what established actress really is up to the challenge of provoking us in an intelligent and forthrightly erotic manner? Jane's boots will be hard to fill, I fear.