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The worst sin of any critic is condescension, and I'll do my best to avoid it here (but it's gonna require an effort). Isabella Rossellini may simply have too much time on her hands these days. It turns out that her latest project—whimsy, actually—is a series of short films titled Green Porno, available on the Sundance Channel.
The title is misleading of course. It vaguely evokes the 1972 porn classic Behind the Green Door, a film both entertaining and (mildly) instructive. But you wouldn't consider Green Porno pornographic, unless perhaps you were a bee or an earthworm—but then if you were either of these you'd likely wonder, "what's all the fuss"?
Green Porno is utterly silly and pointless. And it's silly in a way Ms. Rossellini did not intend. Green Porno is a series of video vignettes on the mating practices of insects. And it's acted—actually re-enacted—by Ms. Rossellini, in costume no less—meaning that we get to watch the actress dressed as an earthworm or a bee or (honest to god) a praying mantis. In all, other than these creatures, she takes us through the mating rituals of the fly, spider, snail, firefly, and dragonfly. Each vignette is, blessedly, only a few minutes long.
The series is not meant to be serious; Ms. Rossellini clearly intends to create a humorous and an informative look at the various sex habits of bees and such. She calls it her "green intervention [Me: I wonder what that means?]. It was to make people aware of animal life." But it is monumentally silly, and its 3rd grade mentality distracts you from actually learning anything about how, for example, a dragonfly mates—you've got to work at it, and that surely wasn't what the actress wanted.
So if you really focus, and have a reason to care, here's what happens vis-à-vis the dragonfly. Before mating, a dragonfly will, having spotted his desired mate, grab her by the neck from behind in a sort of choking hold and then, yoga-like, torque his body so that with an appendage he can clean—that's right, clean—her vagina (seriously) to make certain she will bear only his offspring (sort of a dragonfly douche, I suppose). Then he mates. I truly didn't know that. Now I do, and life goes on, I suppose.
It doesn't help that the insect costumes are meant to appear as though created by talented folk on a flight of whimsy. Actually, the average 6th grader would likely take the project more seriously and do a better job in the costume department. And none of the costumes flatters in the least the enormously talented Rossellini, whose naturally round face looks even fatter and rounder when she's in, say, bee mode.
Isabella Rossellini is a fine actress, an intelligent woman who has sincerely created a series of mini "plays" that she believes will make us laugh and teach us a thing or two. She conceived and wrote most of the sequences; she "acts" in all of them.
Great credit to her for her intentions and her effort.
But, really?
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