‘Diva Futura’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Giulia Louise Steigerwalt. Italy. 2024.129mins

You could frame the life of Italian pornographer Riccardo Schicchi pretty much anywhere between ‘sleazy douchebag’ and ‘courageous campaigner for sexual freedom’. In her engaging but over-long second feature, former actress Giulia Louise Steigerwalt presents the Roman impresario who pretty much invented Italy’s porn industry in the 1980s as something of a fascinating enigma, reserving judgment in a way that feels appropriate for someone who, whatever his faults, was prepared to stand up to the Italian establishment’s often hypocritically judgmental attitudes towards sex – and be dragged through the courts repeatedly as a result.

A small leaf out of the Boogie Nights playbook 

Pietro Castellitto’s nimble performance as the laddish businessman anchors a film based on a memoir Attanasio wrote about her 10 years working for Schicchi at Diva Futura, the agency he founded with Ilona Staller, a.k.a. Cicciolina, the Hungarian-Italian porn star, member of parliament and (briefly) wife of Jeff Koons.

This small leaf out of the Boogie Nights playbook should post good results at the Italian box office following its Venice Competition premiere, buoyed by the nation’s still-fresh collective memory of the Schicchi era and its aftermath. Elsewhere, it will be held back a little by lack of familiarity with all but Cicciolina. The recent Netflix miniseries Supersex – a biopic of Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi in which Schicchi features – may possibly open a few doors for this more complex take on Italy’s late 20th-century porn tumescence.

Beginning with the death of the office’s pet python, Diva Futura plays out initially as a picaresque comedy, introducing some of the ‘pornodivas’, as they are known in Italian, who formed part of the Schicchi stable. Alongside La Cicciolina (Lidija Kordic), these also included Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) and Eva Henger (Tesa Litvan) – a Hungarian starlet who would become Schicchi’s wife. At its heart, this is a movie about an alternative family that came together in a climate of innocent, provocative playfulness and began to fall apart when the revolution Schicchi helped to launch turned against him.

The film’s structure is sometimes difficult to follow, jumping back and forth across the years between the creation of Schicchi’s company in 1994 and his death from a diabetes-related stroke in 2012 in a way that doesn’t add that much depth to a story that might have been better told straight. But a refreshing resistance to the easy backstory explanations in which Supersex wallowed keeps us interested in a man who is both klutzy and canny, considerate to his female co-workers and capable of casual selfishness. Diva Futura presents Schicchi as a woman’s man, an elfin charmer who couldn’t be less wedded to the national cult of machismo – and yet his brand of dreamy romanticism is, we realise, just another, more subtle form of patriarchal control.

There is a slowing of pace and a loosening of grip in the film’s over-stretched second half, as we follow Henger’s painful drift away from a husband she always refused to divorce and the illness that carried Pozzi away at the age of just 33, after her attempts to reinvent herself as a serious actress, politician and writer were largely ridiculed. (She has since become consecrated as a national treasure in Italy, a kind of pornostar saint.) But Vladan Radovic’s atmospheric, pin-sharp widescreen photography, the winsomely chromatic production design of the Diva Futura offices, with their primary hues straight out of the Pedro Almodovar colourwheel, and Michele Braga’s smoky big-band jazz soundtrack give us plenty to work with, even when the story drifts and meanders.