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"Geni-us is mysterio-us." Losey's Modesty Blaise is the model, Roger Vadim's Little Annie Fanny doffs her celestial suit piece by piece until Jane Fonda emerges like a zero-gravity Aphrodite. (Animated credits flit across the centerfold-widescreen, vainly trying to obscure her saucy bits.) Out of the shaggy boudoir and into Sogo the City of Night for the eponymous "star astro-navigatrix," nothing less than "the loving union of the universe" is at stake. On the ice planet she's conked out by Cocteau's stone-in-snowball gag (Les Enfants Terribles) and nibbled at by a horde of fanged dolls, in the rocky labyrinth she zings with Pygar the sightless angel (John Phillip Law in loincloth and tapped-on Icarus wings). Anita Pallenberg as The Great Tyrant rocks a plastic horn atop a raven bouffant and a dubbed-in Joan Greenwood purr, David Hemmings lends Dildano the revolutionary nitwit a marvelous air of abstracted buffoonery. The heroine meanwhile confronts a room full of marauding parakeets and the absconding scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea), whose mighty Orgasmatron machine short-circuits before her mightier carnal desires. "This is really much too poetic a way to die." The spaceship's décor (Seurat canvas, moon goddess effigy, lisping computer) is just the tip of Vadim's slapdash pop-kitsch slurry, one tableau after another of Roman clutter strung together by a fetishistic Gallic gaze. In one last hurrah for her kittenish phase, Fonda glides through all this comic-strip salaciousness with frisky aplomb—freshly rogered and ululating to herself underneath a mound of furs of feathers, nothing is funnier than her mock-bimbo look of surprise. "Vade retro, Earth girl!" The spectacle dissolves in a lava-lamp of The Last Days of Pompeii and The Wizard of Oz, Hodges fuses it all back together for Flash Gordon. With Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi, and Claude Dauphin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |