‘Diva Futura’ Review: An Unconvincingly Bouncy Biopic of an Idealistic Italian Pornographer
Porn king Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s bubbly, shallow “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct multimedia adult-entertainment enterprise, a really sweet guy. Moreover, the film insists, his vision for pornography was similarly wholesome: a means to liberate prudish late-20th century Italian society by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it — with the dazzled, goofy gaze of the permanent adolescent peering through an uncurtained bedroom window.
But what may have been charmingly unworldly in a man becomes disingenuously simplistic in a film that refuses to really look into the forces that propelled his giddy rise and blameless fall, just as Schicchi, gifted a peeping-Tom telescope by his porn-positive dad as a kid, could look away when the women were clothed, or the curtains were closed.
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Confusingly, and with no real reason, the movie hops about in time, so we begin in the middle of the story with Riccardo (Pietro Castellitto) in shock at a sudden death. “It ate her head,” he says, looking in dismay offscreen. “It ate her head,” echoes Debora (Barbara Ronchi), the Girl-Friday-style secretary who wrote the memoir on which Steigerwalt based her uncritical, frankly adoring screenplay. It’s a fake-out — the victim is not a person but a pet snake. This is Steigerwalt letting us know right out the gate that, as further indicated by Michele Braga’s springy musical accompaniment, this is a lighthearted, comic romp, with at most a few accents of schmaltzy melancholy to pass for insight.
Schicchi, the film explains, was a porn prodigy who first tasted success when he collaborated with his girlfriend Ilona Staller (Lidija Kordi?) on her transformation into La Cicciolina, a flower-garlanded child of the hippie era happy to commercialize her free-love image. By the time she breaks his heart by leaving him (for artist Jeff Koons, the film coyly reveals later on) he is convinced that his great talent lies in the creation and promotion of (exclusively female) porn stars — a relatively new concept at the time. His confidence is borne out when he develops the even-more successful career of Moana (an excellent Denise Capezza), who is still such a national icon that 22 years after her death Disney still decided to change the title of their 2016 movie in Italy and to rename the lead character, to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings.
However it’s not Moana, but another aspiring Diva of the Future with whom Riccardo next falls in love. Smitten from his first encounter with éva Henger (Tesa Litvan), Riccardo marries her and in a hypocritical act here glossed over almost as much as the “acts of jealousy” that lead to their eventual separation, forbids her from doing porn. She can still, however, participate in his other ventures, like strip clubs, calendar shoots and risqué promotional activities that all help establish the Diva Futura brand and that, in the film’s montage-heavy editing rhythm, allow the years to zigzag past in a blur of boobs and bonhomie.
The tone remains insistently breezy, the better to flutter through Andrea Cavalletto’s sumptuous yet scanty costuming, even when it takes a turn for the tragic as the agency’s fortunes stumble and diabetic Riccardo’s health begins to fail, and even when describing disturbing incidents. The collapse of one of Schicchi’s girls at his club is mentioned in passing, and the multiple casting-couch rapes that Moana endured when trying to make it as a legitimate actress, is covered as a jokey contrast to how good she had it in Riccardo’s stable. But there is something unconvincing about being buoyed along by Vladan Radovic’s happy, sunsplashed photography to the conclusion that Schicchi built his erotic empire entirely on guilelessness, as the type of dreamer who’d give over a room at his office for the exclusive use of stray cats and rabbits.
It’s not that the porn industry needs to be portrayed as solely exploitative and degrading. But over each close-up of the hapless Schicchi, wearing the uncomprehending expression of a puppy who’s been told off for humping the furniture, you can almost imagine his voiceover claiming “ever since I can remember I always wanted to be a pornographer.” Except the “Goodfellas” of the porn industry has already been done, and having Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” to hand as such an easy tonal and thematic comparison does little for Steigerwalt’s film except show up its lack of depth and steadfast, smiling refusal to self-critique.
Schicchi may have been a prince among men but his worship of women was really a worship of the shape of them, the kind of exaltation that denies their personhood as much as the more degrading porn genres by which he was so horrified. Witness his blank surprise here when Moana launches a political bid and is revealed to be hardline right-wing. Or when, following an argument about money with his wife during which she begs him not to make a certain investment, he deflects by calling her beautiful, and makes the disastrous deal anyway. These incidents are played as further evidence of Schicchi’s good-natured naiveté, but when even — perhaps especially — the prettiest pornographies peddle women as pliant, dimensionless objects never to be taken too seriously, it’s ironic that “Diva Futura” does much the same for him.
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