08/11/2016 - In his fourth film as a director, Edoardo Leo and Anna Foglietta aim to start a family by making a porn film. Released in Italian theatres tomorrow by Warner

Edoardo Leo was one of the stars of box-office champion comedy Perfect Strangers [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Paolo Genovese (which made €17 million at the box office), in which a dinner between friends is transformed into a cruel game where everyone puts their smartphone on the table and agrees to reveal text messages, chat messages and phone calls. With What's the Big Deal [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which hits theatres tomorrow, 9 November, with Warner Bros. Pictures, the director and actor wanted to dive back into the world of digital communication and social media that dominates our lives. The protagonists are a couple, Claudio and Anna (played by Edoardo Leo himself and Anna Foglietta), who live in a precarious economic situation and, to start a family, decide to film a porn film to post on the internet. 

They get to this point by chance. Claudio has come up with a web platform for helping companies to find people looking for jobs. The headhunting agency he turns to, which is managed by ruthless young nerds from a skyscraper in Milan, suggests crowdfunding as a way of providing the means to develop it, but people on the internet don’t seem to understand or appreciate his idea. One evening, drunk and demoralised, and convinced that the only thing that works on the internet is sex, Claudio throws down the gauntlet: if he gets the €20,000 he’s looking for, he’ll shoot a porn video with his beautiful wife. 

What starts as simple provocation goes viral and takes on gigantic proportions: funds pour in amounting to €200,000, people stop them on the street for selfies, Claudio is offered money to attend evenings in clubs (perhaps this is the most entertaining scene), and they’re invited onto television shows, where they’re humiliated for meanness of their indecent plan. Because the ethical, practical and even aesthetic dilemma of this comedy, written by Leo together with Alessandro Aronadio, Marco Bonini and Renato Sannio, is thus: is it right to sell intimacy to make your dreams come true?

What's the Big Deal takes a disillusioned approach to the highly topical themes of digital sharing, privacy, media pillory, social exhibitionism and, on the other hand, the inability of the average individual to deal with all these things. When the two youngsters let their parents in on what’s happening (Marina Massironi, Massimo Wertmuller, Bebo Storti) and an uncle (Rocco Papaleo), as if to gain the approval of the older generation, they lay their vulnerability bare. The film actually makes a specific moralistic choice, and it is no accident that Umberto Eco is quoted, having declared that social media gave the right to free speech to legions of imbecilles who used to only speak their minds in bars after a glass of wine, and now have the same right to free speech as a Nobel Prize-winner. It is all too easy for viewers of the film to identify with Claudio and Anna, and perhaps it would have been more interesting and brave to get inside the minds of those who make these choices without really thinking about it.

(Translated from Italian)