“Adelina Tattilo was a modern woman without knowing it. In working on her character, there was no need to emphasize anything: she was already contemporary.” Carolina Crescentini, 45, proudly talks about her starring role in Mrs Playmen, the new seven-episode Netflix series available from November 12th and inspired by the story of Adelina Tattilo, founder and editor of the most famous Italian erotic magazine. Tattilo, when her husband Saro Balsamo abandons her, leaving her alone to face the creditors as the sole owner of an empire on the verge of collapse, does not give up. Instead, she becomes a pioneering entrepreneur in an era when women were relegated to the role of mothers and homemakers. “What will remain of her is her courage, her creativity, her not being afraid of a male environment that does nothing but tell you to stay in your place. Not being afraid to make him hear your point of view. Allowing herself to always transform”, says Crescentini.
A devout Catholic, but also a daring non-conformist, Tattilo was at the forefront in the battles for divorce, the right to abortion and women’s emancipation in the 1970s. He reinvents Playmen, transforming it into a sophisticated and avant-garde publication and, in the conservative and moralistic Rome of those years, he gathers around him a group of intellectuals, photographers and visionary creatives. Together they break down taboos, provoke the establishment and ignite a cultural revolution, issue after issue, scandal after scandal. “The figure of Adelina does not stop at eroticism in itself, even if it opens up an interesting discussion on how defects and imperfections in an ordinary woman can have an enormous erotic charge, which can be exhibited or not”, underlines Crescentini, “her message is rather the appropriation of a role within a dynamic of seduction. The right to pleasure, being a subject and not an object. But she has also led many other interesting battles, such as the one for the right of access to abortion”. “I would like”, she continues, “for this series to reach young people, but also to older women of Adelina, so that they can say: ‘I haven’t allowed myself this until today, but from today I can’”.
“Mrs Playmen”, the Netflix series on the famous Italian erotic magazine: when it comes out
This series comes at a time when pornography, with its misogynistic and violent models, has returned to the center of public debate. And it was Tattilo himself who rejected pornography itself, choosing instead the path of eroticism: “We talk about eroticism, not pornography. Eroticism is entrusted to the imagination, pornography is an act you witness, it has no interpretation”, specifies Crescentini. The cast, alongside Crescentini, includes Filippo Nigro (Chartroux), Giuseppe Maggio (Luigi Poggi), Francesca Colucci (Elsa), Domenico Diele (Andrea De Cesari), Francesco Colella (Saro Balsamo), Lidia Vitale (Lella) and Giampiero Judica (Don Rocco).
