Between the 1980s and the 1990s, Riccardo Schicchi’s (Pietro Castellitto) Diva Futura agency revolutionized the erotic imagination of Italians by translating the concept of free love into a new mass phenomenon: porn. Schicchi’s utopia was to celebrate freedom through sex and the celebration of women, giving them centrality and involving actresses in the creative processes. In Schicchi’s intentions, porn is free from any patriarchal conditioning: it is not the cog of the sexist system but on the contrary it is a subversive element, which creates confusion and gets on the nerves of the right-thinking people, who are nevertheless among the most loyal customers of his nightclubs.

Thanks to Schicchi’s work, many young women in search of fame become international stars: Ilona Staller, Moana Pozzi and Eva Henger (Tesa Litvan) enter Italian homes thanks to the boom in private television and VHS video recorders. The expression “pornstar”, coined at the time thanks to them, marks the beginning of a new era for porn in Italy and the economic success for Diva Futura.

The media impact was so overwhelming that it led to the election to Parliament of Ilona Staller (Lidija Kordić), known as “Cicciolina”, the birth of the Partito dell’Amore and the candidacy of Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) as mayor of Rome. The success of their films is also due to the climate created by Schicchi in his agency where at a certain point Debora (Barbara Ronchi) arrives, a young journalist who accepts this job as a fallback and then remains at Schicchi’s side until the last and most dramatic phase of his life.

In this large queer family ante litteram, jealousies, torments and contradictions explode, the effects of which generate an out-of-control situation in the Italian pornography industry. Although Schicchi’s intentions were good, his vision of sex and women will not be understood by a bigoted and sexist Italy and, unfortunately, over time his utopia will slowly fade away, along with its visionary creator.

Future Diva is the second directorial effort for Giulia Louise Steigerwalt. With this film Steigerwalt has chosen to confront the Italian porn industry, recently also described by Super Sexthe series about Rocco Siffredi greeted with curiosity by the public and with a certain skepticism by critics. Talking about porn can be risky also because the danger of celebrating abusive behavior is just around the corner; to tell the story of Schicchi, Steigerwalt chooses to rely on very different points of view: that of the protagonist, that of his three most famous artists from his agency and that of Debora. This artistic choice creates a bit of confusion at times – the continuous jumps in time accompanied by captions and voiceovers break the rhythm of the film at various times – but allows the story to have a plurality of voices, points of view and sensibilities.

Steigerwalt – who also signs the screenplay – does a very courageous operation by telling not so much about Cicciolina, Moana or Eva Henger, but about people, or rather women, with their fears, their ambitions and their insecurities; the great merit of Future Diva lies in having restored dignity and three-dimensionality to these women, reduced to caricatures throughout their lives and, in the case of Moana, even after her death.

The linchpin of the story, however, remains Schicchi, played masterfully by Pietro Castellitto: always on point in his gestures, his manners and at ease with both the dramatic and comic registers in which Castellitto reveals himself to be a true showman who has nothing to envy of the great names of Italian cinema past and present. With the role of Schicchi, Castellitto seems to have definitively put aside the label of “nepo baby” and his interpretation, if the competition were not so fierce, would deserve the Coppa Volpi for best actor.

When the director of the Festival Alberto Barbera presented the films in competition to the press, he spoke of Future Diva as a film conceived for the general public. And it is. If on the one hand this generalist vocation responds to understandable market needs, on the other it represents a limit for the great potential of the story and for the many talents who have joined the project. Such a well thought out and intelligent idea, perhaps could have had higher ambitions from an artistic point of view and who knows, maybe the future for Giulia Louise Steigerwalt will soon reserve the opportunity to make the leap towards a less commercial cinema. She would have all the potential to do so.

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