Italian bishops condemned for urging actors to shun sex scenes
Richard Owen in Rome


A row has erupted over “Vatican interference” after the Italian Synod of Bishops appealed to actors to exercise their consciences and refuse to take part in “vulgar and destructive” erotic scenes in films.

The appeal follows public condemnation by the bishops of an explicit sex scene in Caos Calmo, starring the Italian actor and director Nanni Moretti, which has just been released. In the film, directed by Antonello Grimaldi, Moretti plays a television executive who experiences a mid-life crisis after the death of his wife in the course of which he has a torrid affair with a woman he saves from drowning.

Father Nicolò Anselmi, head of the youth section of the Italian Bishops Conference, said that Moretti was normally noted for his “idealistic and sensitive” films. But the “gratuitous” sex scene with Isabella Ferrari, his co-star, would have an undesirable effect on the “impressionable young” since it was shown without any context involving love or tenderness.

Franco Zeffirelli, the film and opera director, said: “The Church is full of pedants who have lost all sense of proportion.” It was a “fourth-rate” film that did not merit the publicity generated by the bishops' intervention.

He said that there was a human “right to life from conception until natural death”. He added, however, that the abortion issue should be left to the individual conscience of citizens, and disassociated himself from Giuliano Ferrara, his former spokesman and editor of the newspaper Il Foglio, who has announced that he will stand for parliament on an exclusively anti-abortion platform.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3371908.ece

hhmmm, please they should leave matter! Why are they watching such movies themselves?