Summary
Supersex repackages the provocative sex and nudity of a porno, but it makes the mistake of bringing adult film-quality dialogue along with it.
Supersex, Netflix’s examination of the life and career of porn star Rocco Siffredi, is built on a bedrock of contradictions. It’s about sex but it isn’t sexy. It’s explicit but it’s not gratuitous. And yet it’s marketed as one of the platform’s raunchiest-ever shows, secure in the knowledge such a description will attract eyeballs, when Season 1 is, in fact, a thoroughly miserable unpacking of toxicity and addiction.
We’re reminded with suspicious regularity that the show is only “loosely” based on Siffredi’s life, which feels like a half-truth since his battles with sex addiction have been public for years. But accuracy isn’t the point. Siffredi, known as the “Italian Stallion” for reasons that will become obvious if you don’t know already, is an avatar through which Francesca Manieri’s series espouses some cautionary tales about numbing trauma with debauchery and excess.
Siffredi was born Rocco Antonio Tano and grew up in the rural town of Ortona in a dysfunctional family. His mother is aggressively conservative. His father is a grouch. One of his brothers, Claudio, is disabled following an attack by a local gang, and another, Tommaso, isn’t really his brother. He is, however, a terrible influence, a hypermasculine ne’re-do-well who parades his unattainably gorgeous girlfriend Lucia around and fills Rocco’s head full of nonsense about his genitalia being a superpower.
This and a pornography magazine titled Supersex starring Gabriel Pontello, whom we and Rocco meet later, is what causes Rocco’s fixation on sex; the way it defines relationships, the euphoric release it provides, and, as he gets older, the money and adoration it brings to Rocco after an impoverished childhood. Rocco doesn’t so much nurture his relationship with sex, which he is never quite able to control or even understand, but point it in the vague direction of any woman, man, sex club, or movie set in the general vicinity.
When Supersex skips forward a few years – there’s a framing device set in 2004, though we barely spend any time in that era – it finds Rocco shacked up in Paris with much older versions of Tommaso and Lucia, who are no longer the hot chic couple, to put things mildly. Tommaso is deeply awful and pimps Lucia out to pay the bills, but she may or may enjoy it, and through this transactional idea of sex, Rocco is further influenced.
Tommaso isn’t the only problem with Supersex, but he’s the most obvious. The show is obsessed with him, to the extent that its middle episodes feel like they’re telling his story rather than Rocco’s. And his story is dull. He’s a self-destructive maniac who doesn’t even have an interesting avenue to express his psychoses, and sometimes his outbursts feel too conveniently timed. He’s there to push Rocco in a certain direction and justify some of his darker impulses, and his reiterative arc is tiresome.
That being said, Rocco’s pathology is underexplored too. In real life, he’s famous for a particularly rough and degrading performance style that is present and acknowledged here, but so little is made of it that it passes by almost unnoticed. The same can be said of Rocco’s experimentation with his sexuality – he sleeps with women, trans women, and men, both in the series and real life – which is surface-level at best.
It doesn’t help that the script is sometimes woeful, not dissimilar from the quality of actual porn, and the much-talked-about sex scenes are, on balance, pretty chaste. There’s sex all the time, to an almost numbing degree, and the smartest instances of it pay particular attention to Rocco’s psyche, but the vast majority of explicit scenes in the series are throwaway efforts to include sex and nudity seemingly for the sake of it (or, more likely, the sake of the marketing.)
Supersex wants to have its cake and eat it; it wants the sex and the nudity of a porno but also wants to be artistic and introspective. What we get is the sex and nudity of a porno and the dialogue to match.
There are some respectable choices, granted, and Alessandro Borghi is well-suited to the role of Rocco, even if I’ve seen enough of his angry sex face at this point to last me a lifetime. Rocco’s story has pitstops that are genuinely affecting, especially anything involving his family in Ortona, and there’s a worthwhile character study here of a man driven half-mad by his inability to examine his flaws.
All told, though, it’s a bland and repetitive series that somehow pulls off the impossible task of making orgies and eccentric sex dens tedious.
What did you think of Supersex Season 1? Comment below.
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