In 1964 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward described the threshold of obscenity that made something porn as “I know it when I see it.” But “Diva Futura” asks us to look a little closer at heaving bosoms and grinding buttocks to see beauty, art, and revolution. Set over four decades, the film follows the rise and fall of Diva Futura, Italy’s first pornography agency founded by the eccentric Riccardo Schicchi (Pietro Castellitto) and his then-partner and star Illona Staller (Eva Henger).
The sun-dappled warmth and sumptuous compositions of director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s filmmaking reflects the agency’s ambition to find exquisite what is labelled grotesque by the moral arbiters of the era. The director’s approach is not concerned by eschewing the male gaze on this industry: The film is almost entirely told from Schicchi’s perspective (a curious choice given it is based on the memoirs of Debora Attanasio, “Don’t Tell Mom I’m a Secretary”). While she and three other key women in his life are afforded self-titled chapters devoted to their origin stories, they remain supporting arcs that serve to contextualize the many strange choices that Schicchi ended up making.
After a little light background on Schicchi’s childhood, where his passions for free-speech and voyeurism blossomed, his life truly began when he met the radiant Illona, a singer, politician, and self-proclaimed “missionary of love” who would star in Schicchi’s first film (and Italy’s first “hardcore” pornography), “Telefono Rosso.” Their relationship is presented with all the tender innocence of first love, and Steigerwalt has the pair near skipping through meadows. While their young romance is extremely sweet, even in this first chapter, a certain unease creeps in with just how unimpeachable the film is committed to making its protagonist. It firmly establishes he is in no way to blame for their relationship’s demise; instead, the reveal of the actual person at fault is the film’s greatest punchline.
Schicchi’s story is next handed over to Moana, the fiercely intelligent, glamorous actress who becomes Diva Futura’s biggest star in Illona’s wake. Moana’s pivot into porn comes after fruitless attempts to be recognized by Italian auteurs end with countless nightmare casting couch scenarios, depicted in scenes that evoke the second act of Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” albeit with noticeably less contempt for their victim. Moana joins Diva Futura as a way to free herself of this cycle of sexual degradation and points out, “I was never molested in porn.” The film effectively posits that the most sustained humiliation these empowered sex workers ended up facing would be at the hands of the slut-shaming mainstream media.
The third woman to enter and re-shape Schicchi’s life is his right-hand woman Deborah Attansio (Barbara Ronchi), who began during Diva Futura’s ’80s golden-era as his secretary. Ronchi’s impeccable comic timing subtly brings out the best in Castellitto’s long-limbed, energetic performance, reacting to his absurdity with looks so withering they would stop a freight train. But she is frustratingly relegated — particularly as the writer of the source material — to being the straight man at the circus and beyond a brief glimpse at her disapproving mother the film is uninterested what appeal this world has for her.
Steigerwalt’s focus is on depicting how Schicchi’s vision for his company was born out of a pure, sweet desire to make its subjects “beautiful forever,” fortified further when he and Attansio reject the market’s hunger for more brutal material (“You’re giving life to the mental disorders of the worst men! I live to amaze not humiliate”), but the approach occasionally comes across as saccharine distortion. When Schicchi reminds Attansio “We are amoral not immoral!” that does not line up with the film’s depiction where characters frequently praise his virtue. He’s depicted as a quirky, horny saint whose only real sin was loving women, cake, and a menagerie of pets a little too intensely.
To round out his life, the final woman who enters is the Hungarian bombshell actress Eva Henger (Tesa Litvan), whom Schicchi would go on to marry, albeit with some unconventional caveats to the matrimony. Its through her that Schicchi is both most passionately critiqued and canonized. Litvan does an extraordinary amount with limited screen time and expresses deep frustration at being beholden to such an impulsive and single-minded figure. But she is also aware that he has the purest interests of their family at heart. This is largely embodied by a recurring theme in the film where the kind-hearted Schicchi dissuades women, including Eva, from being in porn, asking them to forget about the money and consider the impact that their newfound infamy would have on their psyche.
Once all the women that would define Diva Futura are established, the film’s edit becomes increasingly non-chronological for reasons that are never entirely clear and the reliance on dates on the bottom of the screen and Deborah’s hairstyle to ground the timeline is distracting. This also means the final act plays like a sanctifying highlights reel but the film’s gleeful humor and sharp wit largely keeps this chaotic rollercoaster on its tracks. Thankfully, it does lend appropriate weight to the tragedies its subjects endured and is able to sit a moment in mourning when the world enacts its cruelest consequences.
Steigerwalt’s focus remains on celebrating these lives and she luxuriates in each woman’s smallest triumph, which fuses her vision with Schicchi’s, making them all beautiful forever. With all that we’ve seen over the years and tales of manipulation, abuse, and misogyny in sex work and beyond, it’s hard to entirely buy into this sugary version of the man who brought Italian porn to the masses. Perhaps that disconnect comes from viewing these stories with a layer of cynicism that he himself never possessed, and through Steigerwalt’s lens we too are able to put it aside for a while and see beauty rather than obscenity.
Grade: B+
“Diva Futura” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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