In a year when the Venice Film Festival assembled one of the most diverse competition selections in memory, the film that stood out the most, for all the wrong reasons, was Diva Futura. This all-Italian apology for the pornographic movie industry is couched as a seductive, fast-moving, easy-on-the-eyes biopic of the sector’s founder Riccardo Schicchi, a lovable eternal adolescent with a thing for naked ladies.
It is the second feature directed by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt (Settembre), who is best known as a screenwriter of youthful ensemble comedies. Her writing skills are very much in evidence here in the fluid, fluffy, non-stop dialogue and interwoven narrative threads. If only the screenplay had allowed itself a little depth and insight into the lucrative, exploitative and increasingly violent porn industry, it might have looked less like the proverbial sore thumb in competition, competing alongside the heavyweights for a Golden Lion. In any case, it has the buoyancy of a hit in Italy, and the association of Netflix should make it one of Venice’s most-seen entries.
There are basically two ways to go with this kind of story: comedy wrapped around the sordid truth, as in Paul Thomas Anderson’s still-magnificent Boogie Nights (1997), or an out-and-out exposé of a ferociously exploitative business that trades in human dignity with the sole aim of making money, as in Dilip Mehta’s chilling portrait of adult film star Sunny Leone in Mostly Sunny (2016). Steigerwalt opts for a half-way solution that underscores the quaintly humorous side of the adult entertainment business, while pretending all the cold-hearted exploitation was done by later, more vulgar comers.
The story’s biggest handicap is its laughable thesis that Schicchi’s early hardcore efforts, which sold under the counter like hotcakes, somehow represented a Golden Age of pornography that shot down Italian hypocrisy around sexual taboos. What Diva Futura doesn’t do is present these films for what they really were: a greedy cashing-in on the global liberalization of sexual mores, certainly not led by Catholic Italy, in the Sixties and Seventies. And although Schicchi’s “stable” of 1980’s blonde sex goddesses featured in the film – Cicciolina (played by Denise Capezza), Moana Pozzi (Tesa Litvan) and Eva Henger (Lidija Kordic) – are proudly toasted as “pornstars of international renown”, this is only really true of Hungarian performer Ilona Staller, a.k.a. Cicciolina, whose notoriety is linked to her marriage to artist Jeff Koons and the bitter custody battle for their child that ensued when it ended.
This very Italian story focuses on Schicchi, played to easy-going type by Pietro Castellitto (Enea, Freaks Out) as a boy-man who never stops seeing women through a veil of teenage hormones. Helplessly naive, he is a magnet for glamorous actresses and glamourless secretaries; chief among the latter is the mousy Debora (excellent comedian Barbara Ronchey), who becomes his right-hand assistant and exotic pet-keeper, as well as the down-to-earth narrator through which much of the story is told.
Structured around the rise and fall of Schicchi’s company, Diva Futura, whose office on the outskirts of Rome becomes the go-to place for genre actors (and, later, the police), the film gets a lot of mileage presenting look-alikes of the main actresses. Alas, their physical resemblance is pretty much skin deep and lacks the aura of stardom exuded onscreen over the end credits by the real Pozzi (the educated daughter of a nuclear scientist) and Staller (who like Pozzi later enjoyed a modicum of success as a politician, exploiting the contrarian vote to win a seat in the House).
The biggest role belongs to Lidija Kordic as Eva Henger, whose frustrating personal relationship with Schicchi trails on till the entrepreneur’s early death. But even before that sad event, he was bankrupted by bad business deals, despite Eva’s pleas and warnings. Nasty porn merchants appear on the scene, demanding more kinky stuff onscreen, including rape and violence. The pure-hearted dreamer Schicchi demurs. The rise of the Internet puts the final nail in the coffin for traditionally distributed porn, and Diva Futura crumbles around him.
Director: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Screenplay: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt based on the novel by Debora Attanasio
Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan, Lidija Kordi?, Davide Iachini, Marco Iermanò
Producers: Matteo Rovere, Luisa Borella
Cinematography: Vladan Radovic
Editing: Gianni Vezzosi
Production design: Cristina Del Zotto
Costume design: Andrea Cavalletto
Music: Michele Braga
Sound: Maurizio Argentieri, Michele Mazzucco
Production companies: Groenlandia, Piperfilm with Rai Cinema in association with Netflix
World Sales: Piperfilm
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian
128 minutes
