Directed by Marco Filiberti Italy, 2003, 35mm, 105 min. Wolfe Video Florida Premiere

In writer-director-star Marco Filiberti's feature film directorial debut, fictional Italian porn star Riki Kadinsky is like the Baryshnikov of gay male porn - beautiful, magnificent, universally adored across all social and political boundaries. A fantasy? Sure, but welcome to the world of high melodrama, a genre returning to vogue among gay directors with the recent successes of Far From Heaven and His Secret Life. Riki is a ravishing, mysterious beauty who dies suddenly and unexpectedly, at the height of his career, leaving a beautiful 30-year-old corpse, but not before Adored: Diary of a Male Porn Star has dramatized (in flourishing, flowery detail) the episodes of the last year of his life. There's the dramatic funeral of his aristocratic father in the dilapidated family mansion; the tentative re-connection of fraternal love with his conservative older brother; the true and tender love of a fellow porn star he can't accept; and (finally) his attempt to adopt a darling 6-year-old boy whose mother was accidentally killed in front of Riki's very eyes. As a movie hero, Riki has more in common with Lana Turner than Jeff Stryker, but in allying his hero thematically to Pan, the pastoral Greek god who "copulated with many but coupled with no one," Filiberti bravely sentimentalizes the hardcore sex industry in order to tell a tale of universal feeling. And the numerous musical montages from Riki's porn sets are definitely genre ground-breakers!
In Italian with English subtitles.

Total running time: 105 min.
$12 non-members / $10 members

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