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There are two kinds of pornography, according to movie mythology. One kind is sordid, exploitative, and supported by shady money and even shadier characters. Then there is the cuddly, family kind, as fluffy and innocently randy as a burrow full of bunnies, that flourished on video before the horrible internet spoilt everything and made porn rapey. Italian director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura returns us to this Eden of sex tapes and strippers in a scattergun biopic of Riccardo Schicchi, impresario of club, talent farm and film production house Diva Futura. You can decide how much to believe.
As a boy in the 1960s, Schicchi tells his new secretary Debora (Barbara Ronchi), he never grasped the first principles of machismo. Bullied by other little boys, by day he enjoyed giggling with the girls at school. By night, his father would lend him his binoculars to spy on women through their windows, filling in any gaps in his anatomical understanding with whatever under-the-counter girly magazines had managed to wiggle through Italy’s draconian censorship. He even visits a publisher who has just been raided to express his solidarity; it’s outrageous, he says sympathetically, that all this fleshy beauty is kept from the world. Schicchi is then 12.
Just a few years later, he meets the simpering Ilona Staller (Lidija Kordic), better known as Cicciolina, who is a born exhibitionist. The two of them see themselves as liberators, shaking up the nation with Cicciolina’s numerous public displays of nudity and subsequent arrests. Then they move into radio. “Do you want to sleep with me?” Staller coos to cold callers. Everyone does, of course; she’s like an Italian cream donut, irresistible to those with a sweet tooth. The relationship lasts 18 years, but in secret: Cicciolina, fantasy sex kitten, cannot be seen to belong to just one man.
Pornography is the next step. Diva Futura is both club and porn production house, with Schicchi as impresario. Other potential divas join up. Self-possessed Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) becomes the most famous porn star in Italy; she tries to become a congresswoman before standing as mayor of Rome, but finds nobody takes her quite seriously enough. Eva (Tesa Litvan), a Hungarian hopeful, becomes Schicchi’s wife. Eva is not allowed by Riccardo to do porn films, even though she sees a future in it; it is “not for her,” he says firmly to others, cajolingly to her. So much for sharing the beauty.
Whatever contradictions may reside within Riccardo Schicchi, however, he remains the hero of his own myth. Pietro Castellitto plays him as breathily enthusiastic, sentimental and paradoxically naïve; everything thrills or moves him. Castellitto has huge orb-like eyes that, as Riccardo, frequently fill with tears. The kindest person she has ever met, says Eva, but infuriatingly capricious. At one point he fires Debora for being too shy. A minute later, she throws his keys at him and he rehires her immediately. Well, he’s just a boy.
All this is related in criss-crossing scenes, crammed with as many cuts as the eye can stand, that swap back and forth between the ‘70s, ‘80s and noughties so arbitrarily that even on a second viewing, it was hard to place where we were. Riccardo is married to Eva, then they seem to have split. In the next chapter, he’s with her again; the film’s time machine has seemingly ricocheted back through decades to cover another character’s backstory.
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The confusion is heightened by those seconds-long views of the Diva Futura world — blonde bombshells on velvet couches, flashing lights in television studios, the frolicking rabbits in Riccardo’s office — all shot in lavishly saturated color and hurried along by a bebop jazz score. It feels like watching fragments in a kaleidoscope, cascading, reconfiguring for a moment and then going for another whirl.
Giulia Steigerwalt, who wrote the script herself, does let Debora question whether Schicchi’s mission to liberate desire with his sexy revels was always going to lead to the violent stuff he detests. Other people’s fantasies were never going to be the same as his. It’s just a tentative objection, however, to what is largely a eulogy for a supposedly better, kinder time. In voiceover, Debora makes another point: that she has been harassed in every job except this one. There are no drugs; Schicchi won’t even allow smoking in the office, which puts him ahead of the curve in workers’ health policy. It’s a happy, squeaky clean ship. So they say, anyway.
Title: Diva Futura
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: PIPERFILM
Director: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Screenwriters: Debora Attanasio, Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Barbara Ronchi, Denise Capezza, Tesa Litvan, Lidija Kordić, Davide Iachini, Marco Iermanò
Running time: 2 hr 8 mins
