Rating: C
Dir: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Star: Pietro Castellitto, Tesa Litvan, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza
In the eighties and nineties, the Diva Futura company became a powerhouse in the Italian porn industry, then beginning to blossom. Under the guidance of studio head and co-founder, Riccardo Schicchi, stars like Cicciolina and Moana Pozzi became celebrities far beyond the adult entertainment world. To wit: more than twenty years after her death, Disney changed the title of Moana to Oceania in Italy, to avoid any risk of confusion with Ms. Pozzi. Cicciolina was elected to two terms in the lower house of the Italian parliament, though that likely says more about the dysfunctional nature of Italian politics at the time. She did offer to have sex with Saddam Hussein to stop the Gulf War.
Fame was not limited to their home country. While the UK underground tape trading circuit was largely focused on “video nasties”, my dodgy bootleg copy of Racconti Sensuale was a very popular item, and Pop Will Eat Itself wrote a song about Cicciolina. Reached #28 in the charts, pop pickers. All of which is to say, there is material for a good movie to be made about the rise, influence and fall of Diva Futura. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Probably because it focuses on Schicchi (Castellitto), who as depicted here, is just too blandly nice to make an impact. The resulting film is similar: the only times it achieves any impression is when the women are given a chance.
For example, we see Moana (Capezza) insisting on making one final adult film, while dying of liver cancer in her thirties. That’s more memorable than anything Schicchi does. Cicciolina is given surprising short shift, with barely a mention, for example, of her disastrous marriage to infamous pop artist Jeff Koons. Instead, we get Schicchi’s relatively banal domestic dramas with Eva Henger (Litvan). Not having heard of her, I went down a rabbit-hole, ending up watching Henger’s appearance alongside Cicciolina on A Song for Eurotrash, which also featured Sinead O’Connor, Edwyn Collins and Bananarana. I’m not going out on a limb to say the show was both more entertaining and informative than Diva Futura. Based on a book by Schacchi’s secretary, the film feels too kind to Schicchi, with naivety his sole fault.
I suspect that isn’t entirely accurate: you don’t survive for thirty years in the pornography industry, without your innocence being ground down to a bloody stump. Though some scenes do seem plausible, such as Riccardo’s rejection of the Internet, a medium which basically killed off the long-form smut Diva Futura produced. His reluctance to change is in some ways admirable, also refusing to indulge the darker content to which porn drifted. However, the film lacks cohesion, with Steigerwalt chopping up the time-line, to no particular intent or purpose. The end result is a series of largely unconnected scenes: occasionally well-done, such as the splicing of the actresses into historical footage of the people they are playing, just never achieving the consistence and significance the subjects deserve.