The story of A
Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva lives to tell.

By Dennis Harvey

THERE'S NO WAY of knowing just how goth Asia Argento's upbringing was, but one can guess. After all, her Italian horror-director father, Dario, has always looked quite like Edgar Allan Poe (especially in the general health/nutrition department). Scenarist-mother Daria Nicolodi got exotically killed in several of dad's movies. The little bundle of joy herself was directed by pa to be brutally bound and serially raped in 1996's The Stendhal Syndrome. That's already more than enough Trauma (the title of another Argento collaboration) to keep an analyst's couch occupied.

But Asia has danced her mess around in ways much more public/celebratory than $150-an-hour private. She was an award-winning child actor and then successfully restarted that career as a precociously bomba-shell teenager. She's been very good in movies directed by people other than her padre (whose efforts have seldom been noted for attention to acting or character development, let alone plot coherence). Most recently, she crashed international multiplexes as the vixen least likely to be intimidated by Vin Diesel in XXX. What's more, she's directed music videos, shorts, and documentaries; published short stories and a novel; and sung lead for Italian rock bands.

That's just the boring side of Argento's achievements. See also: freeway collision while six months pregnant, in which absinthe was found in her car (she was using the bottle for a video shoot, she reported). Some people's lives are a work of art. A select few have lives that are expensive, collectible works of "outsider" art.

Fanning that personal-notoriety flame with the same sort of adept showmanship ecdysiast Sally Rand deployed in fanning her pastied self is debuting feature writer-director-star Argento's Scarlet Diva. This intentionally perplexing blur of hyperbolized autobio and excitable fiction has taken almost three years to get to a San Francisco movie house. But it arrives at the Four Star Theatre with full berserkitude still flush.

Argento plays Anna Battista, a multilingual Rome-based movie star. But, as she tantrums, "That's actress shit! I want to direct!" So far, so what? However, it's the purple detailing, not the overall premise (let alone plot coherence), that makes Diva. Our first glimpse of Anna after the opening credits is of her being vigorously backdoored by a costar in her trailer; called onto the set for a scene take, she curses cruel fate for not letting her come already. Subsequent forms of immediate gratification sampled include being seduced and abandoned on apartment couch by a blond gazonga queen (Italian porn star Selen); falling into a K-hole during a fashion shoot; solo armpit licking; talkin' heavy hip-hop wigger to an Amsterdam hash dealer; application of lit cigarette to tender forearm; plunging into a mosh pit while seven months pregnant; hallucinating herself as the Virgin Mary with child; etc., etc.

Scarlet Diva does somewhat subscribe to the wounded waif school of celebrity self-evaluation. Anna's actress mother (portrayed by Argento's own mother) is seen in flashbacks as a junkie found fatally overdosed by her two preadolescent offspring. Anna is also seen spying on her teenage bro having sex, then later witnessing his accidental death. Adult Anna is victimized by a rock star (Jean Shepard) whose lyrics are so glibly disaffected she at once blurts "You know I've been waiting for you all my life." She then becomes pregnant and ignores the obvious message behind his not returning her phone calls. She's victimized by a skeezy hair ball of a Hollywood big shot (NYC "outsider artist" icon Joe Coleman) who bears a suspiciously precise resemblance to Harvey Weinstein. In rapid succession, he dangles the role of Cleopatra and his own suckable penis. She's victimized by the crumbling expatriate literary lion (Herbert Fritsch) who admits, "You have talent!" before trying to rape her – and who looks awfully like Asia's own erstwhile director-hangpal, our own Burroughs of boho cinema, Abel Ferrara. But if Scarlet Diva indulges the tears of a clown, at least it admits she is a clown. Argento isn't afraid to let herself look foolish, or plain, or wildly Eurotrashy. The movie has no real story arc beyond its vague goal of eventual cathartic change, yet it has a hurtling energy that's just amused enough to skirt standard digitally shot music video flash. (It also has some of dad's enjoyably garish color-lighting ideas.) When Anna tells her rock star, "I yam da most lonely garl in da wurld," you can almost be sure Argento knows just how stupid that sounds. This globe-hopping, semifantasized journal of personal excesses teeters somewhere between self-parody and earnest soul-searching – a pretty fun place to teeter. Scarlet Diva ego-O.D.s and lives to tell. Yup, the girl does have talent.

'Scarlet Diva' opens Thurs/30 at the Four Star Theatre, S.F. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.