A period drama about an Italian porn empire

Returning to a simpler, more innocent time, when porn stars were elected to Parliament and the “sexual revolution” was still bright and new, the tragic-comedy film Future Diva pays homage to the Italian adult entertainment empire of the same name and the colorful characters who founded and worked for it. Compare to Paul Thomas Anderson's similar theme Crazy nights (1997) will be inevitable and probably will not flatter the much more disorderly, less virtuous Future DivaHowever, writer and director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt (September) his second work certainly has its moments and some outstanding performances.

Furthermore, most of the characters encountered here, such as La Cicciolina (Lidija Kordic), aka Ilona Staller, the porn star politician, and her tragic colleague Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza), correspond to real people. Only those in the know of the period will know exactly how much of this film (and the memoirs by Debora Attanasio on which it is based) is true. But fans of period porn probably won't worry too much about its historical veracity, and in any case, the larger story it tells about idealism versus the brutal forces of capitalism comes through loud and clear enough, if a little shrill at times.

The full title of Athanasius' book is Don't tell mom I'm a secretarysubtitled Memoirs of an Ordinary Girl at the Court of the King of Hardwhich pretty much sums it up. The Debora we meet at the beginning, played with cheerful warmth by Barbara Ronchi, is a hard-working personal assistant who gets swept up in the whirlwind of her energetic employer Riccardo Schicchi (Pietro Castellitto). One of her first tasks when she takes an administrative job with Riccardo is to feed the dozen-plus cats in the back office, a room that is later given over to Cicciolina's snake and eventually dozens of rabbits, proving that Italians were way ahead of the curve in terms of keeping emotional support animals in the workplace.

Of course, the implication is that the business itself is just as crazy, with Riccardo as the affable ringmaster. Steigerwalt's script portrays him as a caring producer who feels affection and pride for the women he's brought into the adult entertainment industry. Naturally, he feels a little more for Éva Henger (Tesa Litvan), the Hungarian performer with whom he ends up in a rocky marriage. But the film and Castellitto paint him primarily as a charming naif who truly believes that hardcore sex performances will somehow liberate the human spirit.

This is the philosophy that drives him to create Diva Futura, presumably, just as belief in the magical power of “love” drives Staller to run for office. Those who remember the 1980s and 1990s will know that her marriage to the American artist Jeff Koons, barely seen here as a character and rarely mentioned by name, presumably for legal reasons, rather demonstrated the shortcomings of that naive belief system. Almost everyone except Debora ends up disillusioned and victimized in the course of the story. But the critique of pornography itself here seems to boil down to the idea that bad people have meddled and ruined things, rather than any kind of trenchant analysis that, say, the anti-porn philosopher and writer Andrea Dworkin might have recognized.

In technical terms, the film's greatest weakness is by far its cluttered editing style, which jumps back and forth and back again throughout the entire time. The constant changes are at least signaled by date stamps, changing hairstyles, and aging makeup, but there's no obvious logic to all these jumps, except perhaps that they keep the film lighter, with happier times in the '70s and '80s to contrast with the illness and despair later on. At least the period production and costume design proves a constant delight, always on point right down to the hair ornaments and cut-off G-strings.