ROME – There's controversy brewing in the wake of the Italian Synod of Bishops appeal to actors that the thespians do the right thing and refuse to take part in "vulgar and destructive" erotic scenes in movies.
The appeal came about after the bishops publicly condemned an explicit sex scene in the recently shown Italian film Caos Calmo, starring the Italian actor and director Nanni Moretti
In the film, directed by Antonello
Grimaldi, Moretti plays a recently widowed television executive who has a
steamy affair with a woman he saves from drowning
Father Nicolò Anselmi, who heads the
youth section of the Italian Bishops Conference, said that Moretti's "gratuitous" sex scene with actress
Isabella Ferrari would have a negative effect on what the Bishop called the
"impressionable young."
Film director Franco Zeffirelli said, “The Church is full of pedants who have lost all sense of proportion,” saying that the “fourth-rate” film was not worthy of the attention and publicity caused by the bishops' outcry.
In the meantime, you just know some priest, somewhere, was just about to make sweet, sweet love to an underage boy. But the bishops apparently had little to say about that.
