Supersex review: Sensationalist new Netflix series strips the world’s most infamous porn star down to the bone

Alessandro Borghi and Linda Caridi in a still from Supersex (Photo: Netflix)

On one level, Supersex – the Netflix biographical series about ‘Italian Stallion’ porn star Rocco Siffredi – might be considered outrageously edgy.

There’s plenty of graphic nudity, and most plot-lines seem to revolve around the protagonist getting either himself or those in his immediate vicinity naked.

But stripped to the bone, you’ll find that it’s the sort of ‘small-man-in-a-big-world’ story that could theoretically have been made by someone like Aanand L Rai or Mahesh Bhatt. It’s about B-tier aspiration, close-knit families, sibling bonds, all at the intersection of male desire and obsession.

Created by Francesca Manieri, the seven-part mini-series tells a fictionalised tale “loosely inspired” by the life of perhaps the most famous porn actor the world has ever seen (every inch of). It begins with Siffredi, clearly unhinged by fame and more than one undiagnosed addiction, announcing before a large gathering that he has decided to retire from the porn industry for good.

He doesn’t explain why, but judging by the crowd’s reaction, they might as well have been told that the Beatles had just disbanded. We smash cut to the past, to the town of Ortana, where a pre-pubescent Rocco, before he adopted the stage name ‘Siffredi’, lived with his parents and siblings.

He’d spend his days ogling the local hottie, Lucia, much to his overbearing mother’s chagrin. Both women would go on to play key roles in Rocco’s life, after he broke free from the confines of his small existence and found himself transforming into an object of fascination and near-fundamentalist fury.

More than any other person, however, the person that he most admired as a child was his ‘brother’ Tomasso, a suave young man forever affected by the knowledge that he wasn’t biologically related to the Tanos. They never let him forget it.