Flak Magazine: Review of Scarlet Diva, 8-22-02

Much the same can be said of Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva, a film so laughably incompetent and utterly vapid that it demands, and deserves, attention. The 26-year-old Argento, who can be seen alongside Vin Diesel in XXX, wrote, directed and starred in the film, which follows a few years in the life of a young Italian actress named Anna. She spends most of her time having sex (the movie opens with her getting doggy-styled in a trailer), but what she really wants is to become a director, an "artist." She already has a script — titled, coincidentally, "Scarlet Diva" (whether or not the script is the same as the film is never approached, just one of of the film's many, many frayed plot strings).

Most of the movie, though, is a series of very loosely related scenes outlining the excesses and exasperations of the black-clad and oversexed of Western Europe. There's a heavy amount of gold lame — particularly on pants — and dark eye shadow, liberally applied. Most of the characters who inhabit Anna's world are stereotypes — the sleazeball Hollywood producer, the jive-talking American pot dealer, the sultry Strokes reject. There are random ones, too, like the ultrafemme lesbian who visits Anna briefly, makes out with her and disappears, bearing no further role in the story.

But for all its Eurotrash provenance, and for all Anna's artistic groaning, Scarlet Diva is little more than a rehashing of that old Hollywood standby: Young, materialistic woman seeks love but finds only sex, falls for the wrong guy and gets hurt, time after time. Except in those stories, from "Sex in the City" to Bridget Jones's Diary, the girl ultimately realizes her mistakes, recants her wild-oats-sowing ways and gets the reward, a nice, stable relationship. Nothing of the sort occurs in Scarlet Diva. At the end of the movie, Kirk Vaines (Kurt Cobain?) — the asshole rock star who gets Anna pregnant and then gets out of town faster than a frat brother leaving a sorority house on a Sunday morning — is still the pie in her sky, even down to the last scene, which ends with a guffaw-inducing shot of Kirk at the stop of a staircase, silhouetted by blinding light.

In the meantime, Anna travels around Europe in tight shiny pants, does a lot of drugs, comes close to getting raped not once but twice, and rifles off gangsta English so awkwardly (think anti-drug rap song) that it's an insult to the language, all to an appropriately cheesy techno soundtrack. The relentless pace of her jet-setting — soon after she learns she's pregnant, she goes to London for a film shoot and snorts special K — never lets up; Anna seems less a character crafted to change as she passes through a narrative arc than a subject of a documentary on the lifestyles of the rich and trashy (an impression supported by Argento's heavy use of fish-eye lenses, hand-held cameras and washed-out light).

Anna/Argento likes to deride Americans (she compares her friend, who is in an abusive relationship, to an American housewife), but she could learn a lot from the average US city dweller: When a slimy producer invites you to his hotel room to show you his "script," he has other things on his mind. When you have sex with a stranger and then profess your undying love, it's understandable that he's going to very quickly put a lot of distance between the two of you. Any 16-year-old could tell Anna a thing about boys — there's nothing even remotely appealing about Kirk, and yet Anna falls for him in what we're told is a near-mythic love (the film's slogan is "The sad tale of the visible woman and her invisible man"). We're asked to see Anna as both jaded and naïve, but when she fails to change one starts to wonder if the same can't be said of Argento.

Indeed, what makes Scarlet Diva extra ridiculous — and extra delicious — is its extremely autobiographical tone: The film is officially a work of fiction, but it's hard to see past the thicket of references to Argento's own life. It's not just that Anna is, like Argento, an Italian actress trying to make it as a director, or that Anna's film has the same title as Asia's. It's that, like Anna, she hooked up with a rock star and got pregnant. It's that Anna is also the name of her daughter, as well as her dead sister; it's even tattooed on her back. It's hard to imagine someone creating a screwed-up character and giving her a name so dear to her heart — unless that character pretty closely mirrored her creator. (On the other hand, Argento has said, mysteriously, that "when I think of my film, I don't take anything from the reality that I know, I suck only from the utopia/ reality I would want to live.")

That Argento (the daughter of Dario Argento, Italy's answer to Roger Corman) never resolves Anna's central crisis — a life stuck in a whirlpool of sleazy sex and heavy drugs — makes one wonder if she sees a crisis there at all. Or maybe, because the film is, in effect, her own life, she knows there's a problem but she doesn't know the answer — making Scarlet Diva a plea for help, masked as Eurotrash soft-core porn, masked as "art house" cinema. Or maybe not. To give the character some depth, Argento does throw in some biographical backstory — a neglectful mother, a loving brother who dies when she's still a teenager — but it's not enough to give Anna motivation, to explain just why she's so misguided and shallow.

The film is a disaster — the dialogue is stilted, the acting is canned and the plot, as far as it goes, is amateur. Everything about it is ridiculous — and yet it is so clearly someone's life, or at least someone's impression of their life, that it's more like watching a video diary than a feature film. Just to consider that there are people like Anna/Argento, who live a life so superficial and banal that making films about themselves is considered "depth," is reassuring to anyone who has doubts about the worth of their own mortal coil. And to watch a full two hours of the stuff — pining for loser rock stars, doing loads of drugs and then wondering why life is so screwed up — is easily worth the price of admission.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)