Green Porno

Performance
Text by Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carrière

With Isabella Rossellini

This is not porno at all in the conventional sense, but a funny take on the issue of seduction and reproduction in the world of non-human living things.

Green is associated with insects, but the subject-matter stretches well beyond that realm, dealing as well with mammals and fishes. Porno makes it seem ribald and racier than it really is, but the idea of titling this show that is part of the semiological trick that brings a well-known personality and unexpected subject-matter together.

The performance itself is informative and entertaining, but what really makes it distinctively effective is the way in which Rossellini uses, and subverts, her conventional persona in the service of wildness and reverie. An actress and model with a sleek and polished demeanor and a long history of association with a major cosmetics company (Lancôme), Rossellini emerges onstage in all sorts of funny costumes and delivers a faux lecture about the sex lives of animals during which she hurls props hither and thither, contributing to the overall sense of anarchy and abandon.

The subject and the show are not entirely new to Rossellini. She had produced, and acted in, a television series (2008) of the same name based on short films she and Jean-Claude Carrière had created, including much of the same material which has now been condensed into the current stage show.

Funny lines erupt at every turn. Interspersed with Rossellini’s lecture-like delivery are these uproarious snippets of film showing her in one sort of guise or another living out the life of a fly, a dolphin, a hamster or a spider. They are all heartbreaking in some way, and hilarious.

It turns out that flies perceive movement much more quickly than humans do, so the simulation of someone swatting a fly with a paper takes the form of the fly, with huge eyes, patiently watching the paper begin to move then lumber along in its general direction in very slow motion.

The Sargasso Sea, the breeding ground in the mid-Atlantic of all the worlds’ eels regardless of wherever else they have been, gets its due, along with the recurring sad tale about salmon charging upstream to their birthplaces to breed and to die.

Hamsters eat their young and spiders dissolve themselves in order to feed their young, and each of Rossellini’s little films portrays these traits with wit and rambunctious fun.

At the very end, Rossellini puts up a picture of her mother, the beautiful and compelling film star Ingrid Bergman, and makes a point about how people frequently compare her to her mother, claiming Bergman was more beautiful and a better actress. Rossellini gives a tough and wise rejoinder, reflecting on the wonderful unpredictability of genetics, while also speaking warmly and appreciatively of Bergman as a mother.

She says her father, famed Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, might have like to be a seahorse, a species in which the males carry the young in pregnancy, so envious was he of that condition.

With the show’s coda, it seems that this is Rossellini’s mission – to unsettle that elegant cool which is so clearly part of her heritage and to turn it inside out, reveal its vulnerable inner core, demonstrate that it’s a refinement of something far earthier.

The show runs only seventy minutes without intermission but is replete with information, gags and laughs, sufficient to fill one’s plate.

– BADMan