Incompresa

Greetings again from the darkness. Asia Argento is a multi-talented filmmaker - actress, writer, director and producer. Her father is Dario Argento, well known for directing gialo horror films, and her mother is Italian actress Daria Niccolodi. Add in her grandmother, who was famed documentarian Leni Riefenstahl, and it's understandable why Asia has created (with co-writer Barbara Alberti) this semi-autobiographical story of Aria … a young girl struggling with self-absorbed parents and a world where she doesn't seem to fit.

It doesn't take long before we realize the film is poorly titled. "Abused and Mistreated" or "Sucky Parents" would be more accurate. Aria, wonderfully played by Giulia Salerno, is a very observant, tougher than we might expect, skinny kid who is fifth in the household pecking order behind her bombastic parents (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gabriel Garko) and her two older sisters (Carolina Poccioni, Anna Lou Casoudi). Aria has a good friend at school, but is mostly an outcast due to her superior essay writing ability and her semi-famous, but rarely present parents.

Featuring one of the more dysfunctional family dinners you'll ever see, the filmmaker's deft touch allows us to pull for Aria as she is booted from her mom's house, and then from her dad's … and then the cycle repeats. Realizing that a connection with her parents (or sisters) will never be more than surface, Aria adopts a wild cat named Dac and proceeds to tote him everywhere. Dac's blackness plays off the color surrounding others – especially her flashy dad and always pink sister.

Being as this is Italian cinema, the characters are always emotional (sometimes way up, sometimes way down), periodically violent, and always passionate. Aria is the tortured young soul simply trying to survive this coming-of-age story with a socially and morally unacceptable parental structure. It's so apparent that with some semblance of love, Aria would fully blossom.

There are flashes of levity, including the dad's over-the-top superstitions, and the expert use of Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I", that provide us a glimmer of hope. However, when Aria says "There are many ways to cry", we know those flashes and that glimmer are all but gone. Though the film is set in 1984, Aria's plea for us to "Be Nice" is as timely today as ever.

Good films are not easy to find, really good films even less so. Incompresa is one of the rare finds.

The story is 'simple', it's about a nine year old girl growing up in the 80ies inside an 'artistic' family, whose artsy parents are so pre-occupied with themselves they don't care about their youngest daughter at all. She barely survives, a miracle that she makes it. All that is shown in an unsentimental way, the audience never gets lured into fake emotions.

Asia Argento, the director, is somebody well worth watching and following. And, btw, she is not, like somebody wrote here, related to Leni Riefenstahl. I don't know where this is coming from.

I saw this film 2 days ago and it is still growing on me. It had the effect of one of those films that you generally like just after viewing, but then you keep thinking about this or that character, or different scenes, and how striking they were, and you just can' t wait to watch it again.

This film portrays very well the difficulty of the transition between childhood and adolescence, and that of growing up in a dysfunctional family, the characters, the situations feel very real and I can relate to many of them, either because of personal experience or friend' s experience.

The characters are memorable, especially the lazy, older half sister with her morbid relationship with her father and her gaudy pink room, the crazy, self obsessed artist mother, and of course the main character, Aria.

I do not want to spend ages analysing this film, I just feel like to give my positive feedback as it really touched me, and I think that if you like good films about teenagers, or coming of age films, you should check this out as it might be for you. On top of all this it is visually very stylish, and has a killer soundtrack.

Argento has managed to transcend the trappings the ocean of coming of age/awful childhood films to create something odd, funny, sad horrifying, inventive and unique.

It's triply impressive because the heroine here is a 'poor little rich girl' – thus making her less automatically sympathetic, and she is clearly rooted in Argento's own childhood growing up with artistic, dramatic and well known parents. And it's very easy for such a personal film to lose its objectivity and simply become a scream at those adults that wounded you as a child. But by playing deftly with black humor and touches of the surreal the film mostly avoids self- pity on one side and the overly familiar on the other.

Yes, by the end watching spunky, sweet and sad little Aria get endlessly shuffled back and forth between her divorced and monstrously selfish parents gets a bit repetitive (although it IS all slowly evolving towards an ending – the repetition does pay off). And a few sequences don't work as well as most. But for every minor miss-step under Argento's adventurous hand there are a number of wonderful and very cinematic moments. It's a film I look forward to seeing again, and I hope it gets an English subtitled release on blu-ray or DVD soon.