Scarlet Diva

Asia Argento, daughter of the legendary horror movie creator Dario Argento, is barely known in the USA aside for a couple of art house movies and the bad movie but commercial success of XXX where she is the only character that really acts.

Even when I saw a few of her movies, mostly horror fare where I could not appreciate her look mixes of a timid person trying to seem strong. Something that make her lovely even when she is not an aggressive beautiful as other Italian actresses like Monica Belucci, Agostina Belly, Laura Antonelli or Ornella Mutti.

Thanks to the generosity of movie distribution, this movie was shown in Miami probably one week in some hidden theatre and of course I was not able to catch it until mysteriously was released on DVD just a few weeks later. Well this is the first time I really grateful I enjoyed the movie in the intimacy and calm of my home instead of a probably empty theatre. Why ?. Just because after seeing the whole 90 minutes, I heard Asia's enlightening interview and after that I saw the movie again but this time only with the director's commentary. Something I never did before in any of the more than 300 movies I own.

Is SCARLET DIVA such a great movie ?. Well no; it really is an amazing experience. The story is not really so. Just a famous actress trying to direct her first movie call SCARLET DIVA and moving in different levels of the industry looking for support. Is also the desperation to find love in an environment were it not exist. The relation among the different bits or scenes is barely existent. Is like witnessing a huge depressing moment in a person you care, and things did not get any makeover.

Two important facts here; first you care about the character because you realize the protagonist is living in a real hell; which paradoxically is the life she choused.

Second it requires a great courage to shot most of the things this movie shows. I am not talking only about the interracial sex or the substance abuse or the humiliations of being in the show business; but also the fantasies, the traumas and your own family and personal dysfunctions.

However, self pity is avoided and risks taken all over. I never saw an actress nude in front of a mirror shaving her arm pits and creating a tender moment out of it. It also requires a lot of guts for a women/actress to accept that she never made love before; because she was always a whore.

Even when most of the things are real, Asia avoids real names and did not point fingers. However, in the commentary, something worth hearing because of the frankness she describes all real and no so real things, she mention several real names (mostly art house and independents like Vincent Gallo) stating how little help or how they betrayed her friendship and the little collaboration on her movie.

The comment itself , is worth almost as much as the movie. It looks so natural and sincere that; if it is not true, she really deserves and Oscar for that.

Although I have to admit, I watched this movie largely out of the prurient interest of seeing Dario Argento's lovely daughter naked and engaging in (reportedly unsimulated) sex scenes, I was genuinely surprised at how good this movie was. While Asia A. has said in various interviews that as a director she has been most influenced by her father, on one hand, and maverick NYC auteur Abel Ferrara, on the other, she demonstrates here, in her directorial-debut, a personal warmth and emotional honesty that is generally absent in the stylistic excesses of the former and usually lost in the sheer pathos of the latter. True, the movie does straddle and (occasionally crosses)the thin line between personal and self-indulgent, but generally it is a moving, semi-autobiographical story of a young woman who has had to, as Lou Reed, once put it "grow up in public". Strangely, the movie isn't really that erotic. One of the most memorable scenes, typical of the movie as whole, has the director/actress completely naked, shaving her armpits in the mirror. While she looks great, of course, there's nothing really sexy or contrived about this scene. She's just a normal girl, totally unself-conscious, going through a morning routine. Asia A. has been often treated by the tabloid press as an Italian version of Paris Hilton or some other scandal queen, but what she may very well turn out to be is another Sofia Coppola, emerging from the shadow of past scandals and a famous father to become a respected artist in her own right.

Basically, Scarlet Diva, at least in my view, is Asia Argento exorcising some personal demons, most likely from her past and maybe some of her friends. It's the story about a druggy actress and her struggle for normacy/sanity in an insane world. It is a very personal film filled with episodes from Argento's past, at least you get that impression. It's a good film and is not the shockfest that it has been portrayed as. Worth a see.

Boy, so much s--t was talked about this film, and I just want to thank you all for dropping my expectations so low that I was able to thoroughly enjoy Scarlet Diva. If you're sitting down to watch this film, one hopes that a certain context is assumed, and an interest has been established, such that terms like "self-indulgent" and "bad acting" do not even enter into the vocabulary. The film pulls you along with heavy visual style, holding its own sexy trash pulse while at the same time prostrating itself at the altar of the director/star's horror-god father Dario Argento, but in a good way. For example, the latter's trademark use of colored lighting is employed liberally, and to appropriate effect. Rapper Schoolly D and NY shock performer/painter Joe Coleman both make great respective turns, as a drug dealer and sleazy producer. Like the work of her auteur Dad, and writer Mother Daria Nicolodi (who appears as "The Mom" in the film), Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva is a horror film, and you will feel horrified at certain scenes. But it's a "horror of life" film, and it's assumed that much of it is semi-autobiographical. Would you pay to see it if it were Drew Barrymore's sleazoid child star/artist family upbringing? Dare to give 90 minutes up to the Scarlet Diva.

Asia Argento triple-hyphenates (director-writer-actress) her first full length drama. The film is considered to be semiautobiographical in nature but deals with the fictional Anna Batiste is the `loneliest girl in the world' who is the top actress in Italy and posed to be unleashed upon the stage of world cinema but takes herself down a path that leads get involved in many bad life altering situations. She is ultimately used up and spit out by sleazy Hollywood producers, rock stars, druggies, photographers and a sordid list of leeches that leave her alone, pregnant and running mad through the streets of Paris.

I'm very impressed with the energy that Argento injects into the film. She clearly borrows from some of the well-known directors she has worked with in the past (including her father Dario) but it all works in her favor. A rich color scheme is used throughout the film that sometimes gives an ethereal feel that is sometimes jarring . The script matches the direction, a little disjointed but it works for the characters spiral into agony. Her acting and the cast around her is very good, her believable portrait of the character throughout the peaks and valleys of her life.

Unfairly blasted by critics this film should be seen with an open mind. True I was already a fan of Asia Argento before I saw the film but you don't have to be in order to like or respect the film.