05/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s second film, dedicated to Riccardo Schicchi, who in the 1980s and 1990s launched several pornstars, features too many details and flashbacks

After the series Supersex [+see also:
series review
series profile] released in March by Netflix, about famous Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi, the Venice Film Festival has selected Diva Futura [+see also:
trailer
film profile] in Official Competition, a film that goes to the roots of pornography in Italy. The point of contact between the two works is producer Matteo Rovere and the fact that the creator and writer of the series, Francesca Manieri, and the director and writer of the film, Giulia Louise Steigerwalt, are women. Directing for the second time, Steigerwalt had received the David di Donatello award for Best Debut last year with Settembre [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] but she’s been active as a screenwriter for over 10 years. Diva Futura is dedicated to Riccardo Schicchi who between the 1980s and 1990s shook Italian mass culture with his agency (whose name gives the film its title), transferring the idea of free love from the hippie movement to a new phenomenon: pornography on VHS and private television. Diva Futura built and launched the “girls next door” Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, Moana Pozzi, Eva Henger (played by Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan and Lidija Kordić respectively), who became pornstars of international renown.

Schicchi, played by an histrionic Pietro Castellitto, is talked about in the film by the voice over of his secretary, Mrs Debora (Barbara Ronchi), an aspiring journalist who somehow ended up in this studio where the desks occasionally served as sets. A man with a big heart, kind, romantic, spiritual, Riccardo will always remain against the more extreme and violent kind of porn that will spread later, especially with the advent of the internet. In the meantime, his cute girls take advantage of this springboard to conquer the world. Moana Pozzi runs for Parliament and then for mayor of Rome unsuccessfully, and she wants to make it in “normal” films as well but she is branded for life (she will die, too young, of a tumour). Cicciolina instead becomes a member of Parliament with the Radical Party in 1987, later marrying the American billionaire artist Jeff Koons, while Schicchi, at least for a while, keeps Eva Henger away from the cameras and male members by marrying her. For him, it is a continuous escape from justice (shooting porn films in Italy was considered to be exploitation of prostitution, so he went to Hungary) and bad choices that will cover him in debt, perhaps due to the glycemic crises provoked by the diabetes that afflicts him and will kill him at 59.

Continuous flashbacks and flashforwards dull the mind of the spectator who gets lost in a sea of episodes and references that aren’t always interesting. Was Schicchi a revolutionary of sexuality or a friendly charlatan who exploited women? Steigerwalt’s film doesn’t take a clear position, and although it gives a few hints of moral judgement - the secretary: “Don’t you think we’ve contributed to all this?”, referring to the pervasive porn that only goes in one direction, the masculine one, all about domination, submission, violence and humiliation - it lets the spectator decide on the verdict. Undoubtedly, this is about archeology, a distracted look at a country hovering between intransigent moralism and “transgression”. After Almudena Grandes, the feminist sex wars - with the internal debate between abolitionists, anti-porn and pro-sex feminists regarding the ways in which some sexual practices may or may not contribute to women’s emancipation - today we know that porn can be ethical, with an approach closer to new sensibilities, in an entertainment sphere that has become tremendously and inevitably pervasive and popular.

Diva Futura was produced by Groenlandia and PiperFilm with Rai Cinema, in collaboration with Netflix.

(Translated from Italian)