Review: Adored: Diary of a Porn Star

The film ends up too steeped in surrogate conscience twaddle to even be bothered to provoke a response, positive or negative.

Adored: Diary of a Porn Star
Photo: Wolfe Releasing

You’ve got to have some major cojones in order to write, direct, and then put yourself in the lead role of a film about a fictional gay porn actor popular enough to garner a standing ovation for kicking a soccer ball at the Gay Olympics and a live breaking news report upon his suicide. But instead of showcasing a brazen young talent (earning the film’s early references to Marlon and Marilyn), Marco Filiberti’s ode to his own sex-god fantasies, Adored: Diary of a Porn Star (original title: Little More Than a Year Ago), positively drips with that element that’s turned many gay films into dour endurance tests: navel-gazing self-pity.

The beloved and phenomenally rich Riki Kandinsky (Filiberti) is a porno director’s pet who’s idolized by wide-eyed, part-time rough-trader Claudio Alatri (Claudio Vanni). Later, he miraculously finds himself closer to his brother (Urbano Barberini) upon coming clean to him about his line of work. But love and acceptance is hardly enough for our tragic protagonist, who resists fulfilling Claudio’s invitations for a stable, practically faux-hetero relationship. Life only begins to have meaning, it seems, when he witnesses a young boy’s mother run over in an auto accident and takes it upon himself to become an alternative role model for the kid, whose grandparents are portrayed as grieving, but still flummoxed as to how to care for him.

Lest Riki get too mired in his own narcissism, Filiberti conveniently supplies the film with a female (but totally sexless) doppelganger: an anorexic, Eurotrash space poet named Luna and played without a trace of humor by Rosalinda Celentano. Gay Christians will eat this ode to homosexual isolation up, and they’ll no doubt recognize Celentano from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in which she played the similarly androgynous Satan. So you’re a drama queen and you want contentious dialogue revolving around the topic of homosexuality and psychological stuntedness? Go ahead and let Gibson lecture you for a few hours on the evils of sex-role deviation, but forget about Adored, which ends up too steeped in surrogate conscience twaddle to even be bothered to provoke a response, positive or negative.

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Score: 
 Cast: Marco Filiberti, Urbano Barberini, Erica Blanc, Rosalinda Celentano, Alessandra Acciai, Claudio Vanni, Francesca d'Aloja, Luigi Diberti  Director: Marco Filiberti  Screenwriter: Marco Filiberti  Distributor: Wolfe Releasing  Running Time: 101 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2003  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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