Porn king Riccardo Schicchi, according to Julia Louise Steiger-Walt’s film “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct adult entertainment multimedia venture, was a genuinely nice guy. Moreover, the film insists, his vision of porn was similarly sound: a way to liberate Italy’s puritanical late-20th-century society by celebrating female beauty as he saw it—the dazzling, goofy gaze of a perpetual teenager peering through an open-curtained bedroom window.
But what might have been charming and unworldly in a man becomes artificially naive in a film that refuses to really consider the forces that drove his astonishing rise and blameless fall, just as Chichi, gifted a spy telescope by his porn-enthusiast father as a child, was able to look away when women were getting dressed, or when the curtains were closed.
But the film jumps around awkwardly and for no real reason, opening midway through the story with Riccardo (Pietro Castellitto) shocked by a sudden death. “He ate her head,” he says, looking off-screen in shock. “He ate her head,” replies Deborah (Barbara Ronchi), the secretary whose memoirs Steigerwalt based her uncritical, frankly endearing screenplay on. “He ate her head,” replies Deborah (Barbara Ronchi), the secretary who wrote the memoirs on which Steigerwalt based her uncritical, frankly endearing screenplay. It’s a ruse—the victim isn’t a human but a pet snake. Steigerwalt tells us from the start, and Michele Braga’s score suggests that this is a fun, comedic affair, with a few touches of naive sadness that could be considered insightful.
The film shows that Schicchi was a pornographic genius who first tasted success when he teamed up with his girlfriend Ilona Staller (Lidya Kordic) to transform her into La Cicciolina, a flower-clad hippie who delighted in marketing her image as a free-spirited love interest. By the time he was heartbroken by her leaving him (to artist Jeff Koons, as the film later coyly reveals), he was convinced that his greatest talent lay in creating and promoting (all-female) porn stars—a relatively new concept at the time. His confidence was confirmed when he developed an even more successful career for Moana (the excellent Denise Cabeza), who remains such a national icon that Disney decided, 22 years after her death, to change the title of its 2016 film in Italy and rename the title character, to avoid an unfortunate misunderstanding.
But what happens next is not Moana, but another aspiring future star, with whom Ricardo falls in love. Having fallen in love with Eva Henger (Tessa Litvan) after their first meeting, Ricardo marries her and, in an act of hypocrisy that is as overlooked here as the “acts of jealousy” that led to their eventual breakup, withholds sex from her. Yet she still manages to participate in his other ventures, such as the strip clubs, the calendar shoots, and the daring promotional activities that all help establish the Diva Futura brand, which, in the film’s heavy editing rhythm, allows the years to pass in a haze of goodwill and affection.
The tone remains consistently cheerful, which is best achieved by Andrea Cavalletto’s lavish, rarefied costumes, even when they take a tragic turn as the agency’s fortunes falter and Riccardo’s diabetic health deteriorates, and even when disturbing incidents are depicted. The collapse of one of Chichi’s girls at his club is mentioned in passing, and Moana’s multiple rapes while trying to make it as a legitimate actress are glossed over as an ironic contrast to how successful she is in Riccardo’s stable. But there’s something unconvincing about being encouraged to continue through Vladin Radovic’s happy, sunny photography to the conclusion that Chichi has built his entire sexual empire on naiveté, as the kind of dreamer who might give up a room in his office for the exclusive use of stray cats and rabbits.
We shouldn’t just paint the porn industry as exploitative and degrading. But in every close-up of the hapless Sketchy, who wears the uncomprehending expression of a puppy who’s been scolded for having sex with the furniture, you can almost imagine his voice claiming, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a pornographer.” But the “good friends” of the porn industry have already been made, and having Paul Thomas Anderson’s Dance Nights as an easy comparison in tone and subject matter does little to Steiger-Walt’s film except to show its lack of depth and its steadfast, smiling refusal to self-criticism.
Chichi may have been a prince among men, but his worship of women was really a worship of their form, a kind of adoration that denied their personhood as much as the more degrading pornography that terrified him. Consider his blank astonishment when Moana launches a political campaign and is revealed to be a far-right extremist. Or when, after an argument about money with his wife, she begs him not to invest in something, he sidesteps the conversation, calls her beautiful, and makes the disastrous deal anyway. These incidents are presented as further evidence of Chichi’s good-natured naivety, but when even—and perhaps especially—the most beautiful pornography promotes women as obedient, dimensionless objects who should never be taken seriously, it is ironic that Diva Futura does the same to him.
