2024-03-22 16:51:56
A ten-year-old boy is walking down the night street of the Italian town of Ortona when a magazine called Supersex, thrown from a passing car, lands at his feet. It was a moment of initiation for the hero of the seven-part series of the same name, which can now be seen on Netflix. Rocco Siffredi, Europe’s most successful porn actor, who appeared in more than 1,700 adult films, was born here somewhere.
Even when little Rocco Tano was running around the streets of Ortona with his cousin, if they weren’t fighting rough Roma boys from the neighborhood, they were looking at girls. Especially after Lucia, who was the talk of the town and who was dating Rocco’s already grown half-brother Tommaso.
The mother – like the rest of the family affected by the tragic death of another of Rocco’s siblings – clung to the idea that the boy would become a priest. But when Rocco first looks at the pages of a pornographic photocomic that landed on him from above, he receives a completely different revelation.
The author of the series, Francesca Manieri, and the crew really emphasize religious parallels from the first moments. Siffredi’s biography is conceived strongly from the perspective of the protagonist, who expresses himself in frequent monologues about the nature of the insatiable desire and ability that was born in him. As if it were a superpower, as if some mythical creature had been born, the man with the biggest penis in the world, as older brother Tommaso calls him.
At least the first third of the series focuses on childhood and adolescence in Ortona and the complicated background or family relationships – partially deformed by violent fights with Roma neighbors, but mainly distorted by the actions of the unbalanced Tommaso. The creators portray him as a rapist who, although he forces Lucia into prostitution, is extremely jealous at the same time and romanticizes his toxic behavior with sentences like “a woman who loves you must bring home money”. Rocco, meanwhile, is straight-forward in his pursuit of his dream, even though he can’t quite name it yet.
The two gradually leave the legacy of their hometown behind and disappear to Paris, where Tommaso becomes involved with the mafia, while Rocco begins to discover what is between his legs and what he does with women. And that he could also make a nice living from it.
Rocco Siffredi, played by Alessandro Borghi, has appeared in over 1,700 adult films. | Photo: Lucia Iuorio
Supersex is a provocative work. It tells the story of a man known not only for the number of porn films he made, but also for the often very harsh practices he carried out in them, such as strangling, spitting or having sex with a woman with her head in a toilet bowl.
Creators tend to avoid such moments. Not that they explicitly close their eyes to them, but mostly they look at everything purely through the lens of a man who feels that he has found fulfillment and satisfaction in the activity in which he is the best in the world and which – he believes – also fulfills those around him.
Erotic scenes are often depicted here slowly like moving versions of old masters canvases, more romantic than lascivious or rough, which supports the sound of seductive Italian disco. Almost as if it were a hagiography, and not a portrait of a porn actor. Although, admittedly, not ordinary – in the 1990s, Siffredi became a star who changed the rules of the industry, a publicly known person who acted, among other things, in two art films by the leading French director Catherine Breillat.
The creators made some bold, if somewhat remarkable, decisions. Supersex does not hypocritically moralize the pornographic industry, on the contrary, it shows a paradox – that Rocco becomes a bigger outcast in a Catholic-based society than his brother, who does not hesitate to blackmail or even kill people.
We have seen similar gangsters on screen many times. Let them commit the most heinous things, always as if it were something inevitable, an integral part of a society full of mafia, as if these atrocities had some kind of internal order, because floods of books and films thematize things like criminal honor. Few people attribute similar positive qualities to porn actors.
The Supersex series does not moralize about the pornography industry. Pictured are Alessandro Borghi as Rocco and Gaia Messerklinger as Moana. | Photo: Lucia Iuorio
These are perhaps the strongest moments of the series. When it shows how Rocco becomes the black sheep of the family because he has consensual sex with others in front of the camera. Which can be seen everywhere, because it operates in a business based on the distribution of recordings.
While copulating in dark alleys and the privacy of apartments is considered boyish, just like solving problems with fists or a knife, being part of the porn industry is decadent and for “buzzers”, it is heard repeatedly in the series, which also portrays the atmosphere of the time ravaged by the fear of the AIDS disease. This is also why the romantic, slightly cheesy stylization of pornographic scenes makes sense.
However, one often wonders if it is too simple. The slow-motion scenes full of colors with an almost dreamlike dimension and disco music in the background give the impression of a scented telenovela and encourage a so-called camp reading – that is, a mode where we rather enjoy the style and aesthetics of the work, when we give meaning to something slightly fallen.
Supersex puts together a portrait of a great personality, and the question is whether Rocco Siffredi deserves a similar mythologizing, however dark it may be. In the series, he undoubtedly becomes a fascinating object of interest, but at the same time a strange paradox. The sensitive optics, or even the proclaimed feminist point of view, are ultimately only possible at the price of the fact that it is a product of fantasy that closes its eyes too much to reality.
Serial
Supersex
Creator: Francesca Manieri
The miniseries can be seen on Netflix.