Small-town girl Jennifer Bradley moves to San Francisco to eke out a successful career as a photographer, and soon she gets caught up in the sexual revolution that's going on around her and becomes involved with lesbian model Belinda Frazier after her relationships with men prove to be dissatisfying.
USA
USA
Not bad as Nick Phillips films go, SAPPHO '68 features a ton of incredible footage of the burgeoning hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury ca. 1968, as protagonist Jennifer wanders the streets snapping photos. Like pretty much all of Nick's sex flicks, this is MOS and nearly plotless, with Jennifer learning to embrace her latent lesbianism by cavorting with model Belinda for 45 minutes, before a jealous lover shows up to make trouble.
Uniformly shitty at first blush, whatever joys are to be found in Phillips' erotica reveal themselves over extended exposure, where you start to develop a weird affinity for his unique, purple prose narration, invariably duking it out for supremacy on the soundtrack (and mostly losing) against an endless drone…
Might have been breaking new ground when released, but now this is just an incoherent jumble with boobies.
Maybe it was seen as progressive for its time, but it just gave me Russ Meyer vibes.
