'90s adult entertainment impresario Riccardo Schicchi is the brilliant subject of this deliberately rosy hagiography from director Giulia Louise Steigerwalt

Porn kingpin Riccardo Schicchi was, according to Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s effervescent, superficial “Diva Futura,” named after Schicchi’s now-defunct adult multimedia entertainment company, a really nice guy. Moreover, the film insists, his view of pornography was just as healthy: a way to liberate the prudish Italian society of the late 20th century by celebrating the beauty of women as he saw it — with the bewildered, goofy gaze of the permanent adolescent peering through a curtainless bedroom window.

But what seemed charmingly otherworldly in a man becomes disingenuously simplistic in a film that refuses to really look at the forces that caused his dizzying rise and innocent fall. Just as Schicchi, given a peeping tom telescope by his porn-positive father as a child, could look away when the women were dressed or the curtains were drawn.

Confusingly and for no real reason, the film jumps back and forth in time, so we begin in the middle of the story with Riccardo (Pietro Castellitto) in shock at a sudden death. “It ate her head,” he says, looking off-screen in horror. “It ate her head,” echoes Debora (Barbara Ronchi), the Girl Friday-style secretary who wrote the memoir on which Steigerwalt based her uncritical, downright adoring screenplay. It’s a fake-out — the victim is not a person, but a pet snake. This is Steigerwalt letting us know right away that, as Michele Braga’s bouncy musical accompaniment further indicates, this is a lighthearted, comedic spectacle, with at most a few touches of sentimental melancholy to pass for insight.