Supersex Netflix Series Review: The Myth of Rocco Siffredi Between Sacred, Profane and Superhero
Cast: Alessandro Borghi, Jasmine Trinca, Adriano Giannini, Saul Nanni, Enrico Borello, Vincenzo Nemolato, Francesco Pellegrino, Gaia Messerklinger, Jade Pedri, Linda Caridi, Nutsa Khubulava
Created By: Francesca Manieri
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars)
Supersex, the series freely brought to life by Rocco Siffredi, will have its world premiere at the 74th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival (15-25 February) in the Berlinale Special section and will debut on Netflix on 6 March 2024. Directed by Matteo Rovere, Francesco Carrozzini, Francesca Mazzoleni, and produced by Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment, a company of the Fremantle group, and by Matteo Rovere for Groenlandia, a company of the Banijay group, the seven-episode series of Supersex focuses on Rocco Tano, a simple boy from Ortona, who became the most famous porn star in the world, in a story that explores family, origins and the relationship with love. Alessandro Borghi plays Rocco Siffredi, Jasmine Trinca is Lucia, a fictional female character who represents the synthesis of many women with whom Rocco has had a relationship in his life, Adriano Giannini plays Tommaso, Rocco’s half-brother, while Saul Nanni plays the role of Rocco the boy. The cast also includes Enrico Borello (Gabriele), Vincenzo Nemolato (Riccardo Schicchi), Gaia Messerklinger (Moana), Jade Pedri (Sylvie) and Linda Caridi (Tina).
Rocco Siffredi is a name that everyone knows. An important name, in some ways cumbersome. A name that carries with it the smell of sex and that has made a young provincial boy a true world star of pornography. Today everyone knows who Rocco Siffredi is, but few know his true story, his humble origins, and that desire for revenge that led him to dream of a bigger life than what his country of origin could offer him. One side overlooks the sea making you imagine distant horizons and on the other, it is well rooted to the ground, among vineyards, olive groves, and that sense of concreteness that reminds you every day of what matters in life: hard work. A simple boy from Ortona, raised in a suffocating and respectable province, viscerally linked to his older brother, Tommaso (Giannini), and his mother Carmela (Garribba), will become the most famous porn star in the world. Obsessed with the protagonist of a pornographic comic, Supersex, Rocco will grow up with the dream of becoming like his superhero, feeling a burning desire grow in him over the years, like an electric energy full of life, a “superpower” that he will have to learn to tame.
Supersex Netflix Series Review: The Story Plot
2004, Paris. Rocco Siffredi (Borghi) is now a veteran of the world of porn, or rather, a revolutionary in his environment like not even the best Costello could hope to be. An accomplished professional, but a man who still has to come to terms with a past that manifests itself through the vision of his beloved brother Tommaso (Giannini), believed to be dead. In the middle of the crowd or the audience, the man wanders around like a ghost who has arrived to remind the star that little Rocco Tano is still inside him, the same one who, once he has taken off his role as Supersex, shows up again throughout its fragility. Supersex was a comic that fell from the sky (more or less) into little Rocco’s life when he still lived in Ortona, Abruzzo, together with his numerous brothers, father, and mother. A difficult life, divided between the difficulties of his home, the abuses of the gypsies, and the desire to break (so to speak) the world, a sense of redemption that Tommaso himself once represented.
He was the example for little Rocco, the successful brother, who despite being rejected by his father because he was not a legitimate Tano, was the one who was always smiling and, above all, the conqueror of Lucia (Trinca), the girl that everyone wanted, the one who with just one look had the power to change a man’s destiny. If you could have the Lucies of the world then you would be like the superhero Supersex. This idea bursts into Rocco’s life through the comic as a vision of his future, which will connect Ortona and Paris, him and Tommaso, love and porn with an indissoluble bond, making them coordinates of a troubled, but intense and spectacular life. A life in which our Rocco will discover that becoming Supersex is not the solution and that the superpower that counts is having the courage to see ourselves in the folds of our dreams and our pain.
Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and all the main superheroes were born from comics and Rocco Siffredi was also born from a pornographic magazine with the porn star Gabriel Pontello Supersex was read by chance as a child. The story does not begin in large and chaotic metropolises, but in the small and quiet city of Ortona in a not very wealthy family with numerous children. The older half-brother Tommaso, played first by Francesco Pellegrino and then by Adriano Giannini, is the one who plays the role of Rocco’s educator from an early age. However, he is not the healthiest person to be around, as not only is he a violent and manipulative person who is often involved in criminal activity, but he also has misogynistic views on sex and women which are passed on to Rocco from a young age.
The life of Netflix’s Rocco begins like this, between a very religious mother (played by Tania Garribba), but busy looking after her sick brother Claudio, a platonic (and then physical) love for Lucia, who in reality is not based on a person real but was created as a mixture of various women Rocco had affairs with in his life, and feuds against crime families who wanted to have power over the area. The more Rocco grows and discovers the world, especially after moving to Paris, the closer he becomes to his idol of Supersex comics and the world of porn. From Saul Nanni‘s Rocco Tano (and before that a child) he becomes Alessandro Borghi‘s Rocco Siffredi.
Supersex Netflix Series Review and Analysis
As already mentioned in the introduction, history, as they say, is history, but it is not for this Netflix series. This is what makes Supersex uniquely addictive, but it’s also partly its downfall. On the one hand, not having to tell things exactly as they happened gave the production great creative freedom with Alessandro Borghi truly inspired and skilled in embodying this fictional version of Siffredi. Supersex‘s most absurd and over-the-top moments are so well-timed, choreographed, and tongue-in-cheek, that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The shots are at the same time detailed and precise and the scenography takes up locations and costumes of real scenes and moments which makes the story even more plausible and realistic.
At the same time, due to the playful tone of these many moments, the series doesn’t manage to make all of its characters multifaceted enough to successfully tackle the more serious themes. Tommaso, for example, is presented as the typical Italian gangster never loved by his family, not even Rocco’s, who manages to make himself alone and mistreats everyone around him. In this case the series borders on melodrama, with many scenes of violence and sexist insults already in the first episodes which in the long run are annoying. Tommaso’s characterization is so subtle that even though he is such an important figure in Rocco’s life, he is easily the least interesting character in the show. Tommaso’s wife, Lucia, takes care of mitigating the situation, even though she is a conscious victim of her husband’s violence. Jasmine Trinca‘s performance is wonderful, and it is impossible not to empathize with her character. But this is due more to the chemistry between Jasmine Trinca and Alessandro Borghi than to its narrative arc full of clichés and pain.
Rocco’s character, on the other hand, is well-defined despite many of his points of view being contaminated by Tommaso’s teachings and his ties to his mother. It is a pleasure to watch him grow as an autonomous individual and it is through his character that Supersex manages to explore the theme of toxic masculinity. Despite his obvious obsession with sex, he still manages to mitigate all the most sexist observations of his half-brother by transforming them into non-toxic truths, making those moments in which one understands that Tommaso is only the fruit of a rotten society and not very free of express one’s being.
But as the story continues, other key characters enter the scene such as Moana Pozzi played by a wonderful Gaia Messerklinger and Riccardo Schicchi played by a very good Vincenzo Nemolato. Church, political, and health issues emerge with the emergence of the AIDS scandal, yet Supersex spends too much time on Rocco’s dysfunctional relationship with Tommaso, giving this toxic and exhaustive connection unnecessary exposure in the long run. Fewer episodes and less time dedicated to their relationship would have kept the plot rigidly focused on Rocco’s psyche and the porn scene. The lives of Lucia and Rocco’s mother, who appear and disappear like two ghosts in the protagonist’s life, represent a sort of counter-narrative to that of Rocco. Just like the porn star’s female co-stars, she is not granted the same decision-making power and status that he gets.
Women are sexualized and then demonized for being sexually active. The trio is an intriguing contrast, but this reflection is confused under their dark call and feelings towards Tommaso. Likewise, the resulting view of women as objects, namely Rocco’s enthusiasm for violent sexual acts, is never fully explored. Supersex, however, makes some smart choices. Sex and other types of sexual acts are showcased, of course, but these scenes are not pure gratuitous nudity. Instead, they illustrate Rocco’s emotional state as he deals with loss and longing or even demonstrate her sense of self-worth and love for him. The culmination is shown in the penultimate episode when Rocco returns to Ortona to be close to his mother and in the same period, he also wins the award for best European actor at the Hot d’Or Awards.
In just under an hour, the episode deals with joy, the effects of shame, and how family members react towards him. The final result is a very powerful episode on a psychological and visual level, very different also rhythmically from the previous ones. The perfect example of how Thomas’ story could very well have been overshadowed. Supersex is an interesting series, and we recommend watching it, but unfortunately, it limits itself to telling a mostly plausible story without ever emerging. It is not a biography; it is not a criticism or commentary on the pornography industry nor on how Siffredi and Moana together with Schicchi and Pontello were the pioneers of free sex and the power of pornography. It doesn’t even emerge because Rocco decided to call himself Siffredi. Supersex focuses far too much on an at times very poor criminal subplot which mistakenly represents the fulcrum of a story that could have said much more.
There are beautiful moments, fortunately far from rare, in which space is given to love, fulfilled and broken dreams, the concept of loneliness, and the important themes of prejudice, violence, and pain. You feel anger, sadness, disappointment, and hope also thanks to a perfect and well-inspired soundtrack. It was enough to reverse the narrative focus to achieve perfection. With Supersex you cry, you are horrified, you feel joy, disgust, pleasure, anger, compassion. It is a series with a crazy expressive power that is not afraid to exceed, disturb, and above all, most importantly for any art form, to excite. So let yourself be won over by the story of Rocco Siffredi, stand beside him on his growth path, witness his right choices and also the wrong ones, root for him, and learn together with all the characters who stand beside him that what matters more than everything else in life is taking the risk of being yourself to the fullest because “only those who dare to accept that risk become masters of themselves”.
Supersex Netflix Series Review: The Last Words
Supersex is a miniseries with wonderful staging, and very high-level acting quality, but a script that is not always perfect. It focuses on potentially secondary aspects, to narrate fundamental events that are almost left in the background while others are barely mentioned. It emerges intelligently with flickers that disappear within a few minutes. Perhaps more audacity was needed? We are convinced so, but the final result is equally appreciable. The life of Rocco Siffredi becomes a series that sometimes errs on the side of excessive poetic license but provides a fascinating portrait of the famous Italian porn star. Supersex is a coming of age, a family drama, a story of redemption and emancipation, and a story of abandonment. A deconstruction of stardom and the world of porn through the continuous search for love. A series, in short, that wants to be many things, and that does not always manage to find a key to doing so fully, despite a visual recipe and recognizable and coherent assumptions. The problem, however, lies precisely at its epicenter, because, going beyond the attempt to talk about hardcore through a normalizing language, it seems that the story desists from delving into what should be the reason for its very existence.
Supersex Netflix Series Review: The Myth of Rocco Siffredi Between Sacred, Profane and Superhero - Filmyhype
Director: Francesca Manieri
Date Created: 2024-03-06 16:32
3.5
Pros
- The myth of Rocco Siffredi between sacred, profane and superhero
- High level soundtrack and staging
- Many delicate and important topics are covered...
Cons
- ...but unfortunately only the story between Rocco and Tommaso emerges
- Too much discrepancy in acting quality between the main and secondary actors
- No criticism or commentary on the porn industry past or present
