Unconvincingly Bouncy Biopic of a Pornographer

Porn king Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt‘s bubbly, shallow “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct multimedia adult-entertainment enterprise, a really sweet guy.  Moreover, the film insists, his vision for pornography was similarly wholesome: a means to liberate prudish late-20th century Italian society by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it — with the dazzled, goofy gaze of the permanent adolescent peering through an uncurtained bedroom window. 

But what may have been charmingly unworldly in a man becomes disingenuously simplistic in a film that refuses to really look into the forces that propelled his giddy rise and blameless fall, just as Schicchi, gifted a peeping-Tom telescope by his porn-positive dad as a kid, could look away when the women were clothed, or the curtains were closed. 

Confusingly, and with no real reason, the movie hops about in time, so we begin in the middle of the story with Riccardo (Pietro Castellitto) in shock at a sudden death. “It ate her head,” he says, looking in dismay offscreen. “It ate her head,” echoes Debora (Barbara Ronchi), the Girl-Friday-style secretary who wrote the memoir on which Steigerwalt based her uncritical, frankly adoring screenplay. It’s a fake-out — the victim is not a person but a pet snake. This is Steigerwalt letting us know right out the gate that, as further indicated by Michele Braga’s springy musical accompaniment, this is a lighthearted, comic romp, with at most a few accents of schmaltzy melancholy to pass for insight.     

Schicchi, the film explains, was a porn prodigy who first tasted success when he collaborated with his girlfriend Ilona Staller (Lidija Kordić) on her transformation into La Cicciolina, a flower-garlanded child of the hippie era happy to commercialize her free-love image. By the time she breaks his heart by leaving him (for artist Jeff Koons, the film coyly reveals later…