A film by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt
With: Pietro Castellitto, Denise Capezza, Barbara Ronchi, Lidija Kordić, Tesa Litvan, Davide Iachini, Marco Iermanò, Beatrice Puccilli, Paolo Ricci
Set in the ’80s and ’90s will tell the story of the casting and production agency « Diva Futura » founded in 1983 by Riccardo Schicchi and Ilona Staller.
Our rate: **
A nicely produced biopic, with a fully assumed entertaining function, which benefits not only from a good pace but also from a clear narrative structure, even though it opts to go back and forth between several temporalities. The biopic’s main success lies in its focus on an atypical, rarely hero-ized character, perfectly served by a convincing performance from Castellito, who manages to perfectly bring out a form of goodness, of innocence attributed to Schicchi, and makes him touching, but also and above all, in the fact that it succeeds in sympathetically depicting a not-so-distant era that today seems very much a thing of the past, and which must quite naturally question Italians. The recklessness of the ’80s gave rise to the first excesses, and Italian pornography, which is portrayed as gentle throughout the film, was born with characters like La Ciccolina (Ilona Staller), a creature born of a collaboration between Schicchi and Staller. It would have been tempting to take a closer look at the latter, who is far more famous on the international scene, and whose various antics and stances have been reported, not without a joking tone, all over the world. Yet this seemingly frivolous world also included people who were aware, sensitive and, in the case of one of them in particular, intelligent. The collective portrait brings out the happy days of this craft of erotic art, led by a small troupe presented as joyful, in contrast to the dark days of large-scale industrialized pornography. Admittedly, the film suggests that what was to follow was born of a first step aside, in the face of an Italy that a few years earlier was far more prudish, but it does so with a kind of nostalgia that can also be found in France among certain franchouillards, who make a similar observation about the evolution of erotic cinema à la française (erotic nanars, which were still trying to get scripts) versus pornographic cinema, which multiplies and juxtaposes hardcore scenes, conscious of the viewing time and real function of these films . .. Entertaining, well-paced, rather futile and frivolous in its own right, finding Diva Futura in competition at the Venice Film Festival is still surprisingly weak in terms of aesthetic impact.