Netflix's Supersex Is All Moaning and Furious Humping, Signifying Nothing

Marketing for Netflix's new Italian-language limited series Supersex revolves largely around its frequent, relatively explicit sex scenes. I personally stopped counting around two dozen, and that’s just including penetrative sex involving our lead, not alleyway BJs or brief glimpses of depraved acts in sex clubs. (Sorry to be graphic, but it’s difficult to avoid here.) Star Alessandro Borghi estimates that he has “between 40 and 50” such scenes in the show, and he would know — although it says something that he also lost precise count.

Supersex is a Netflix show, which means that all seven hour long-ish episodes premiered on the platform simultaneously. And said episodes were not made available in advance for critics (though the show had its world premiere at last month’s Berlinale Festival), which means that I watched all seven back-to-back. And what does it feel like to binge 40-plus sex scenes over nearly seven hours? Numbing. It feels numbing.

In an ideal world, this would dovetail with what appears, at first, to be the overarching theme of the show: That for Rocco Siffredi (Borghi), having sex with legions of women was less about pleasure and more of a compulsive ego trip driven by insecure machismo. In voiceover that’s sprinkled throughout the series, Borghi describes the feeling of emptiness that accompanies his character’s many conquests. And the first episode shows how an unhealthy relationship with his playboy half-brother Tommaso (Adriano Giannini) essentially groomed Rocco to believe that sexual potency was the most important measure of a man.

This is an interesting angle, and a believable one. As silly as it is to hear the character describe the hero of a porno comic book as his superhuman “idol,” there is a strand of toxic masculinity that views women as sexual trading cards to be collected and swapped at will. There’s an underlying misogyny to that worldview that can’t help but seep through into the series, and a not-so-subtle homophobia to the way these men talk to one another on screen. The show doesn’t support either of these attitudes, and indeed is critical of both of them. But it can’t quite articulate its thesis on the forces that made Rocco Siffredi who he is.

Instead, to its detriment, Supersex continually apologizes for Rocco. Sure, he calls a colleague a gay slur in one scene, but later on he calls that same person his “best friend!” And yeah, he views sex as dominance and his partners as statistics, but he checks in with a woman who’s crying after a scene! It’s less that all of this is offensive to progressive sensibilities, and more that it’s an attempt to cram a messy, complicated person into a neat, justifiable progressive box.

This timidity carries through to the much-ballyhooed sexual content. There are a couple of scenes, intended to underline Rocco’s open-mindedness, that show him engaging in erotic acts that defy the macho norm. But, for the most part, the sex in Supersex is unimaginative, with lean, hairless, white cisgender bodies heterosexually slapping against one another as the women make what can only be described as porno noises. (The FFM threesomes are especially amusing in this regard, sandwiching Rocco between two women who barely even kiss.) And so they all blur together, moaning sound and furious humping, signifying nothing.

Rocco does star in a couple of BDSM videos —in the dominant role, of course — and the show asserts that women actually like rough sex, which is fine and true in many cases. But, again, these scenes read less as a bold statement on unruly desire, and more of an apology for Rocco’s more controversial output. A subplot where Rocco’s first love overcomes her repression through visits to a Parisian sex club also seems well-intentioned, but gets much less screen time than paeans to the loneliness of a man whose romantic partners never understand why he needs to share his God-given gigantic penis with as many women as possible.

There is one character who really gets Rocco: His sister-in-law, Lucia (Jasmine Trinca), who works the streets of Paris’ Pigalle district with Tommaso serving as both her husband and her pimp. Lucia and Rocco are comrades in the sex trade, and while he’s celebrated for his promiscuity — even his pious Catholic mother is proud of his success as a porn star — she’s cast out and condemned. Yet another interesting thread that’s underdeveloped in favor of drama between the two brothers.

That’s the fatal flaw of Supersex. After establishing that Rocco’s prolific sexuality is hollow and borderline pathological, it then pivots into a messy blend of tones — part Boogie Nights, part operatic tragedy — that don’t really work together, and don’t work with the whole “dead inside” thing, either. Why should we care about the love life of a man who, as the show’s spent hours establishing, can’t feel love? If this is all empty and kind of sad, how can the wacky antics make us laugh? And if Tommaso ruined his wife’s life and warped his little brother’s mind, what pity can we really muster for his downfall?

Given that the emotion is just as anesthetized as the sex, what’s left to enjoy in Supersex are the clumsy subtitles — I’m assuming that the line “no matter how well you learn to fuck, life always fucks better than you” sounds better in Italian — and '80s-'90s Eurotrash fashions. (Pause Episode 4 at the 08:30 mark for the most hilarious basketball jersey you’ve ever seen.) Some of them (the fashions, anyway) are meant to be funny. And when the show leans into absurdity, it does have a certain camp value to it. But on the whole, Supersex has the aura of an authorized biography — and it’s the unauthorized ones that are really juicy.

Supersex is streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and film critic based in Chicago.