Barbara Broadcast

[StevePulaski]

Barbara Broadcast (1977)
Directed by: Radley Metzger


Rating: ★★★

Set in a dystopian New York, Barbara Broadcast takes place entirely in a restaurant with an usual menu, sex, fellatios, cunnilingus, and most kinds of fetishes. Waiters and waitresses stop by tables quite frequently to satisfy their customers or find somebody who can in due time, and quick-witted questions like, "Barbara, is your business still open for pleasure?" and "It's past my head-time" are exchanged amongst waitresses and customers.

Director Radley Metzger, who gave us the decorative and elaborate pornographic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven, gives us Barbara Broadcast in the same sort of light and position as his other films. For one, this film is captured in a surrealist state of mind, in a world where casual sex, most specifically public sex, isn't a taboo or something to bat an eye at. Metzger keenly imagines a world robbed of the societal taboos and double takes people do upon seeing public displays of affection, much less sex. Secondly, he conducts everything in a very beautiful, almost picturesque manner, with soft lighting not over-embellishing the light colors on-screen and very mood-sensitive music to compliment the decadent setting.

Our titular character is played by Annette Haven, and is being interviewed by a local women determined to get to the bottom of Barbara's seasoned history as a server of her valued customers. Right in the middle of her interview, Barbara stops to give a young customer a blowjob and, immediately after asking is he could finish in her mouth, she stops her performance to say that he is not old enough. "How old do I have to be to cum in a woman's mouth," the young customer asks Barbara. "Old enough not to ask," she states before batting her eyes and devoting her undivided attention back to her interview.

Metzger, who serves as the film's writer and director, joyfully plays with the film's tone here and doesn't skimp on the eroticism. While a plethora of sex scenes have that occasionally jarring series of closeups on the actions, but Metzger is always one to make his sex, whatever the position or the situation, classy in a way that a great deal of early pornography could struggle with. Consider the sex scenes of Mona the Virgin Nymph, a film I proclaimed limp and remarkably forgettable had it not been the first pornographic film to obtain a wide, theatrical release in theaters. That film beared so many washed out sex scenes ruined by angles and cloying music.

Barbara Broadcast has a much more elegant presentation, with sex scenes that emphasize eroticism, music that is actually immersive to what's occurring on screen, and a plot that's somewhat interesting based on the simultaneous inanity and the destruction of sexual taboos. With this and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Metzger has firmly shown his true colors for pornographic filmmaking and they are colors that shine brighter than a great deal of his contemporaries.

Starring: Annette Haven. Directed by: Radley Metzger.