Barbarella in the Old Folks Home
JOHN BENNETT
(originally sent out to Bennett’s email list)
I watched a French movie last night, streamed it on Netflix just because it had Jane Fonda in it and I wanted to hear her speak French.
Jane’s a long way from the Barbarella she was 46 years ago, in this movie she’s a senior citizen with maybe a month left to live, and she’s married to a senior citizen who has Alzheimer’s. They hang out with another senior-citizen couple they’ve known since the days when Jane was Barbarella, them and a lone-wolf senior citizen they’ve also known forever, they all go way back, and way back the lone-wolf senior citizen was getting it on with both of the wives, and now, forty years later, it comes out, which takes the two women by surprise because neither of them knew about the other one, and the husband who doesn’t have Alzheimer’s takes it pretty hard and goes after the lone wolf with a knife, but it isn’t long before they’re all worn out and have to sit down, and the husband with Alzheimer’s writes it down in his diary: Claude was fucking our wives. He keeps a diary to take the place of his vanishing memory, and every day when he opens it and reads the page about Claude fucking his wife he’s startled all over again, until one day he rips the page out and tosses it! Brilliant!
It goes on and on, the lone wolf has a heart attack following a prostitute up three flights of stairs, the husband with Alzheimer’s winds up in one of those homes and the other four spring him out, and then they all move in together until Jane Fonda dies, apparently she had cancer. They give her the upbeat funeral she wanted, but afterward the husband keeps wandering around calling her name, unable to figure where she got off to.
What caught me off guard was about halfway thru the movie it comes out that these old people are about four years younger than I am. I shut the computer down, brushed my teeth and went to bed, a lone wolf who hasn’t been laid in a long time and has to get up early to go to work.
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Find John Bennett’s novels, short stories, and shards at Hcolom Press. You can contact him, or get on his Shards list at dasleben@fairpoint.net. Read a review of his novel Children of the Sun & Earth here
[blurry screenshot from Barbarella, 1968]
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