Barbara Broadcast

Radley Metzger himself says that Barbara Broadcast is a creative lark after the spectacular The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but it can also be described as a spin-off, or simply a different story from the same world (an idea that is bolstered by the fact that the final bondage scene, presented as a memory, was created for and eventually left out of the previous film). The narrative again takes us into the world of celebrities and the upper class composed of renowned businesses and luxury offices, though we don’t get a realistic or exploitatively prejudiced view of the life of the upper crust, but a satirically twisted version of it. Instead of real asexuality and sterile superficiality, we are invited into a world where sex is a ubiquitous, everyday thing. Thanks not only to the bold thematisation of New York and its high society, Barbara Broadcast seems today like a sexually explicit paraphrase of Sex and the City, except here the suspense prevalent force is a consistently applied sexual revolution – sex is a matter of asking for it or an opportunity presenting itself, so the characters do not have to deal with any frustration or romantic relationships. Just as we could marvel at the humorous airline sex scenes in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, this time we are in a luxury restaurant where the menu includes not only food and drinks, but also the bodies of waitresses and waiters, or a combination of both, and where a passionate threesome on the stairs in the bar is as common a sight as two guys arm wrestling at a nearby table. This immediacy also brings absolute freedom of pleasure in terms of individual practices, so things that are now confined to specialised genres such as pissing, bondage and anal are not surprising here (the film was made many years before anal sex became a prevalent practice in mainstream American porn). Everything that happens in the film is shrouded in a dreamlike atmosphere of discontinuity and episodicity, which is heralded by the opening title announcing that the events in this film are based on real fantasies. However, at least the first half of the film has the same drawback as The Opening of Misty Beethoven, where sex acts inevitably lose their erotic appeal due to the fact that they have become commonplace. The change of mood in the second half is thus all the more welcome, as the sequences get a more sensual and seductive form. The highlight of the film is the unforgettably raunchy kitchen sequence, which is one of the best porn sequences in history thanks to its hot atmosphere, dynamics of seduction and blissfulness. (2014.03.31)