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Supersex has already conjured up some of the most intensely traumatizing sexual experiences a person can have; perhaps it was inevitable that it would eventually get around to some of the most intensely transcendent. Set apart from the other episodes even by its title, “The Island,” Supersex’s fifth episode and its best since the premiere, chronicles a months-long lost weekend of endless, loving, liberating sex between Rocco and his new girlfriend, his first girlfriend. In this, as in its portrait of Rocco’s abuse and awakening, the show is fearless.
Actors Alessandro Borghi and Linda Caridi have explosive sexual chemistry as Rocco and Tina, a model he meets on a so-called “soft shoot.” Despite the prohibition on getting hot and heavy physically, they’re there mentally within moments, staring into each other’s eyes and kissing as if they already know their future together. “Do you just fuck,” she asks him as they leave the shoot, “or can you also hold another hand?”
“I don’t know,” Rocco replies with smiling honesty.
“No?” she replies. “Try. Hold them.” So they walk off together into love.
It’s a complicated sort of love, admittedly, in which Rocco’s career and his innate hypersexual nature alternately attract and repel Tina, and in which his total emotional commitment to Tina alternately uplifts and saps Rocco’s spirit.
As people often do — just as you can talk about something, you can very much fuck about something — Tina hashes out her contradicting feelings through sex. When Rocco comes home from a shoot still smelling of a long day’s work, she grills him on whether the women he fucked came (“I don’t know and I don’t care,” he replies, a telling response as pertains to pornography of the era) and whether they were wet (the answer there is yes).
She spits in his face. He strikes her. She denigrates him as a non-entity, as nothing but a dick. Then she orders him to fuck her, and he does, roughly, hand around her throat at her request. His voiceover narration talks about how deep the mystery of women is to men, and how badly he wants to penetrate that mystery. Insofar as this kind of rough stuff becomes his professional calling card — recall that he was already developing a reputation for roughness in an earlier episode — he’s apparently found his way in.
But more importantly for now, he’s in love, and his description of it to his marvelous, kind, eloquent, and dying friend Franco stopped me dead in my tracks. “I don’t know anything about her, and I don’t care,” he says, echoing his earlier statement about whether his co-stars achieve orgasm during their scenes. “I just know that I look at her, I think about her, and I want her. And I want her differently from how I want the others. I feel her body, and I want her to want me. You know? So bad.”
Yes, of course I know! Don’t you? Isn’t that a description of love in full intensity? Cheap Trick really had it right. It’s not just that you want the person. You want their wanting of you. You want to gaze into their eyes and see yourself, the same way you know they can be seen in your own.
For this, Rocco is willing to give up everything. He gathers all his cash and takes a permanent vacation to an island in Greece. The moment Lucia pays the rent, she begins taking off her clothes, before the landlord is even out of eyeshot if he cared to look. They’ve come to the island with one purpose: to love each other.
“I saw our bodies open up,” Rocco narrates. He does mean literally, in that each penetrates the other’s ass for the first time; both acts are depicted with admirable time, detail, and passion. But he means more. He’s talking about the way great sex, life-changing sex, cracks something in you open. Whatever it might be, it feels like giving a drowning man oxygen. For Rocco, the oxygen is love.
For a while, anyway. The money starts running low. He estranges himself from his beloved (and also dying) mother because he’s ashamed he can’t send cash home anymore. He’s antsy to get back to work, both because they need the money and, though he denies it, because he needs to fuck more people more often, all the time, basically forever. That’s an increasingly angry Tina’s theory, at any rate.
The final straw comes when Tina reveals she’s pregnant — a pregnancy that lasts exactly long enough for her to elicit the truth from Rocco, that he doesn’t want the baby, before she reveals she’s already miscarried. She blames her well-endowed lover for deliberately fucking her too hard in an attempt to end the pregnancy. She doesn’t tell him this until they fuck, though. Him telling her he doesn’t want to have a baby with her is like him wrapping his hand around her heart rather than her throat.
Months earlier the two were prancing around outside naked in beautiful light captured by director Francesca Mazzoleni and cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, whose naturalistic palette makes the scenes in both Greece and Paris — where alcoholic, paranoid Tommaso shatters his relationship with Lucia by nearly killing their baby, and here Sylvie pursues her music career fueled in large part by the energy unleahsed by her sexual awakening. Now, ten months later, Linda has this to say about Rocco:
“You’ve ruined my life! You ravaged my pussy! Because you have no idea what feelings are! You penetrate, empty yourself, and leave. All you know how to do is destroy people who love you.” She repeats this last line for emphasis. There ends love.
So Rocco returns to Paris, but only to say goodbye to Lucia, who seems and looks much better since leaving Tommaso and moving in with Sylvie and her mobster brother Jean Claude. “Only the heartless can be free,” she tells Rocco when he tells her he’s headed to America, then asks why she hasn’t asked him to stay. “You’re lucky you don’t have one.” She elaborates further that Sylvie says she feels free when she’s around Rocco; Lucia can’t spend more time around him, then, because “Sometimes it’s nice being a slave.” They hold hands, just as Tina had once dared Rocco to do.
At any rate, Rocco rebounds quickly — his talent is too prodigious for him to stay down for long provided he goes back to using it. Arriving in America, he makes himself a star instantly despite speaking about as much English as I, a person named Sean T. Collins, speak Italian, simply by using the kavorka on a fellow performer who’s refusing to work with her scheduled scene partner. His cousin Gabriele is so convinced they’re about to conquer America that he leaps into a pool full of beautiful women fully dressed. As far as he’s concerned, this, not whatever Rocco and Tina were up to in Greece, is living the dream.
This is a dreamy episode, I can tell you that much. I already called out the incredible lighting, and I’ll do so again: If you watch enough TV shows, you know how exciting it is when a prestige TV drama’s daylight looks like daylight and its nighttime looks like nighttime. Throw in some terrific scenes taking place at dawn and I’m fully sold — and that’s before you get to the incredible tableau of Sylvie playing the piano nude while naked bodies writhe onstage all around her, like something out of a wet dream. Composer Ralf Hildenbeutel contributes a great deal to the gauzy atmosphere as well, with a beautiful piano piece that accompanies Rocco and Tina’s initial fall for each other, and the use of a sonogram heartbeat as the backbeat for the music during the sequence centered on Tina’s pregnancy.
But I’m going to think of two images when I think of this episode: Rocco and Tina against the purple horizon, and Lucia riding away on a bicycle Rocco impulsively purchased for her from a passerby. These are two times Rocco found and gave love, actual love, with and to a woman — the latter of whom he hasn’t touched sexually at all, or even been seriously tempted to. That superpower lives within him too, but it doesn’t come to him as easily as the one that’s defined his life so far. He’d have to work at it. But when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
