Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno explores the fine art of animal sex

Star Isabella Rossellini turned a lifelong fascination into the cult web series Green Porno, spawning a stage show as funny as it is strange

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      Thanks to her Green Porno web-video series, viewers have witnessed Isabella Rossellini don a grey-foam fat suit and a six-foot-long erect phallus to demonstrate whale mating habits. We’ve also seen the Euro-elegant actor get her green head bitten off after mounting a praying mantis; wiggle in a long, pink worm outfit that shoots gunk out of its orifices; and stroll through a forest of elaborately sculpted penises to show how species-specific they all are.

      The goal of these quirky, low-tech shorts? To reveal the weirder sexual habits of the animal world.

      “I thought, ‘Why not share how they make me laugh?’ But also get people to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ ” the genial star tells the Straight over the phone from New York, speaking of why she launched the surreally scientific series that’s now inspired a stage monologue that she’ll soon bring here in a sold-out show.

      Rossellini, who is studying for her master’s in ethology (the study of animal behaviour), wants Green Porno to celebrate the sheer breadth of biodiversity on this planet. “The more originality, the more strangeness,” she says, “the better for me.”

      You can’t help but think how those two attributes have defined Rossellini’s fascinating film career, from her breakout as the tortured torch singer in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to the baroness who dons beer-filled, glass leg prosthetics in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World.

      Rossellini has never been averse to taking artistic risks, least of all with Green Porno, a Sundance Channel online project that has gone viral. It’s led to a book, a documentary, and the stage show, which travelled from Australia to Europe before coming here in a presentation by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Italian Cultural Centre.

      With her charmingly naive-looking but rigorously researched series, Rossellini is in the vanguard of web filmmaking. But she says candidly that the project has grown out of a late-life need to redefine herself. “I’m going to be 63 in June, and if I don’t create my own work, nobody’s going to hire me,” she admits. The blatant reality is that modelling and acting careers are not welcoming to older women. “Either you retire or evolve your career.”

      But in many ways the project is also taking her back to her first love. Rossellini has been obsessed with animals since childhood. Coming from film royalty—she was one of three children born to silver-screen goddess Ingrid Bergman and neorealist Italian director Roberto Rossellini—she spent a lot of her younger years in and around Rome, where her father lived after her parents separated.

      “I believe you’re born liking something, but we always had dogs and cats at the house and then, growing up in Italy, there was farmland close to the city, and it was common for people to have chickens and pigs,” she remembers. “I thought about making films about animals when I was a teenager—I had applied to work in Italy at, like, the local National Geographic or NOVA, but they didn’t take me. And then life evolved; I became a model, an actress.”

      It speaks to Rossellini’s modesty that she would sum up her colourful career in such a simple way. A model by the 1980s, Rossellini became the face of Lancôme for 14 years. And she enjoyed eclectic film roles that spanned the controversial Blue Velvet, more mainstream hits like Cousins and Immortal Beloved, and the far edge of the cinematic avant-garde with Winnipeg’s Maddin.

      Isabella Rossellini.
      Mario del Curto

      By the time her film and modelling career started to slow down (Lancôme infamously ended her contract due to her age), she decided to go back to school to study ethology.

      And so the subject was a natural when she was approached by Robert Redford and the Sundance Channel to do a web series to debut in 2008. But these were not going to be your average National Geographic episodes.

      “Sometimes, other animal documentaries don’t show the humour,” Rossellini says, adding she knew the series had to look different, too—in part because of the fact the episodes would be viewed on computers. Rossellini laughs to think mobile screens weren’t even in mass use when she was creating Green Porno—but they became a big consideration as the project developed into several different series and spinoffs. “We looked at it and thought, ‘It has to be colourful, simple.’ With a screen so small, you needed a clarity. So there are only three or four colours for each film—and all of this was for this new canvas coming out.”

      But the stylistic choices also speak to Rossellini’s own offbeat tastes and sense of humour. She tells the Straight she wanted to mix the primitive magic of filmmaker Georges Méliès’s 1902 silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) with the retro visual tricks of Maddin. “He makes wonderful effects that I call kitchen special effects,” Rossellini says. “I felt they were full of charm and I wouldn’t want Guy to make them any other way.”

      The result uses preschool arts-and-crafts techniques to present the animals’ often scandalous behaviour; blue tissue paper might blow out of a whale’s spout, or Rossellini might don a furry hamster suit (before eating her young).

      The program’s latest incarnation, as a live show, came about because of another glamorous actor-model of a certain age. Rossellini says her friend and French icon Carole Bouquet persuaded her to turn Green Porno into a live monologue. Legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière helped her pen the words.

      When the one-woman show hits Vancouver, expect more of Rossellini’s coy humour and scholarly science in a warped illustrated lecture that includes clips from her web series, further mating habits, and—yes—the return of that hamster costume.

      Having travelled to 35 cities with the piece, Rossellini is now in the midst of writing a new monologue. And right after talking to the Straight, she was named president of the Un Certain Regard jury at this year’s Cannes Festival, where she will also take part in a tribute to her mother. Although she talks about having to create her own jobs these days, Rossellini has a lot on the go. And what about all that academic study toward her master’s in animal behaviour?

      “I’m finishing it, but it takes me a long time because I’m so busy working!” she says with a laugh.

      The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Italian Cultural Centre present Green Porno, Live on Stage at the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday (April 25).

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter @janetsmitharts.

      Comments

      3 Comments

      Temporary_Commentator

      Apr 23, 2015 at 12:41pm

      Learned that Rossellini is apparently a "Euro-elegant actor", whatever that actually means. Whatever happened to speaking normal and conveying a point clearly and elegantly without resorting to cringeworthy "hipster neologisms"?

      Honestly, some of the current language trends using English as a host are literally tearing me apart. Wait, what? I hate to be "that guy" but it's kind of true. See what I did there?

      Back in the day (e.g. the year Blue Velvet was released) when the interwebz was just some geeks dreaming big at CERN, a barebones apocalypse proof military comms network under the Colorado Rockies and a handful of university CS students flame waring on Usenet...well, language memes travelled at sub-light speeds and took much longer to infiltrate popular culture and civil society. Unlike today where you have 70 year-olds giggling about taking "selfies" like they're talking about something vaguely pornographic and adults everywhere talking like middle-schoolers with a serious social media habit.

      Thankfully Ms. Rossellini is too Euro-sophisticated, or whatever, for that nonsense. On a more serious note, I've long admired Isabella Rossellini for doing her own thing and defying easy categorisation and will definitely be checking out her latest offering. Thanks for sharing!

      Shibby

      May 3, 2015 at 10:53am

      The "Fine-art" of animal sex.

      Ya, OK

      Not Sold.

      It was an OK show.

      May 3, 2015 at 4:41pm

      Isabella Rosellini has a lovely presence on stage, but the premise and the delivery were pretty elementary. Not worth the $84+ ticket price. There were a few laughs, but the subject matter was not terribly illuminating.