Asia Argento DOES the DOG!
Ms.
Argento provided the most talked-about scene of the film, perhaps even
of the festival: the canine kiss. She was terrified of the Rottweiler
at first, but after a day of bonding, grew comfortable enough to
incorporate the animal into her pole dance. Midscene, “the dog decides
he loves me,” she said. “So to keep him calm I kissed him.”
There’s
a sick punch line to the anecdote, an Argento-esque one you might
say. “The dog died,” she said. “Or that’s what Abel told me. I hope
it’s not because of the kiss.”
WITHIN the hothouse atmosphere of last month’s Cannes Film Festival, the Italian actress Asia Argento was a weather system unto herself, creating pockets of turbulence wherever she went. Ms. Argento, whose first name is pronounced “AH-zee-ah,” is one of those rare actors whose mere presence instantly makes a movie less predictable. She had three films in the festival, and in each one, handily conquered scenes that would reduce most performers to nervous wrecks or laughingstocks.
The World of Asia
In Catherine Breillat’s “Old Mistress,” playing a Spanish courtesan entangled with a pretty-boy aristocrat in 1830s Paris, she consummates the affair by hungrily lapping the blood off her wounded lover’s chest. They later have tearful sex next to their dead baby’s funeral pyre.
As an ex-prostitute in “Boarding Gate,” a transcontinental thriller by Olivier Assayas, she ensnares a former lover (Michael Madsen) in S-and-M mind games that turn increasingly physical. The highlight is a complicated maneuver involving handcuffs, a belt and a whole lot of nerve.
The real showstopper, though, is in Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales.” As an exotic dancer — introduced as the “scariest, sexiest, most dangerous girl in the world” — she storms a strip-club stage, pet Rottweiler in tow, and proceeds to entwine tongues with the slobbering dog.
With her feral magnetism, Ms. Argento, 31, is indeed sexy and, for some, undoubtedly scary. But her taste for the outré, easy to dismiss as provocation, hints at a deeper fearlessness, apparent in her headlong performances as well as in her willful career choices. In a series of conversations during Cannes (and after the festival, by telephone from Rome) she openly discussed the pleasures and risks of self-exposure and the tension between person and persona.
“In Italy people think I’m a cliché,” she said. “The dark lady, the bitch from hell. All they can see is that I’m naked.”
If there is a theme in Ms. Argento’s career, it’s that there’s more than one way to be naked. The daughter of the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, she is also a filmmaker and has created for herself a pair of flamboyantly lurid star vehicles: “Scarlet Diva” (2000), a Eurotrashy psychodrama about an actress who wants to be a filmmaker, and the full-throttle J T LeRoy adaptation “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” (2004), in which she plays the mother of all monstrous mothers.
For Ms. Argento directing is partly a way to control her own image and by extension the course of her career. “It could have gone one way or another,” she said. “I was doing these mainstream comedies in Italy when I was a teenager and winning awards. I was a golden kid. And then I did ‘Scarlet Diva,’ and everyone was like, ‘Whoa, who is this?’ ”
Her English-language film career began in the late 1990s, in the under-the-radar indies “B Monkey” and “New Rose Hotel.” In 2002 she appeared opposite Vin Diesel in the blockbuster “XXX” and landed on the cover of Rolling Stone. (“She Puts the Sex in XXX.”) But instead of building on her new action-babe status, she moved toward smaller, quirkier roles.
She skulked through Versailles as Louis XV’s louche mistress in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” blended into the hangers-on entourage in Gus Van Sant’s doomed-rocker elegy “Last Days” and — working with George Romero, an old colleague of her father’s — battled zombies in “Land of the Dead.”
Ms. Argento’s latest films, which prompted festivalgoers to crown her the “queen of Cannes,” are the most generous showcases yet of her charms. “An Old Mistress” and “Boarding Gate” feature the trademarks that have made her an all-purpose mystery lady — her salacious scowl, her damaged-goods vulnerability, her unplaceable exoticism, her many tattoos — while also throwing fresh challenges in her path.
In her decidedly uncorseted costume drama, Ms. Breillat positions Ms. Argento as a destabilizing force of nature, peeling away clothes and hypocrisies in a single swoop. Mr. Assayas creates a fanboy valentine, testing his star’s talent for erotic bravado and athletic action, even in lingerie and spike heels. (“Boarding Gate” will be released here this winter by Magnolia Pictures and is so far the only one of Ms. Argento’s three Cannes films with an American distributor.)
Mr. Assayas, who wrote “Boarding Gate” especially for Ms. Argento, said he had been impressed with her unpretentious openness. “She doesn’t distinguish between high and low art,” he said. “When she acts, it’s an amazing combination of pure instinct and virtuoso technique.”
Both of those qualities are on full display in the talky sequences that she and Mr. Madsen partly improvised. These long bouts of kinky one-upmanship got so extreme that she sometimes left the set in tears. In one particularly intense scene, “he bit me,” she said, providing unprintable specifics about where and how.
“He’s a brilliant actor, but he’s a manly man,” she said. “It was difficult for him not to be in charge.” To get the desired response she would try surprising her co-star, whom she called, with a laugh, “Mad-sen.” “There was a scene where he just couldn’t say the word ‘slave,’ so I started masturbating,” she said. “He was so taken off guard. It felt like the only thing I could do to make it work.”
Ms. Argento’s usual sense of control was demolished when she worked with Ms. Breillat, who has a reputation for putting her actors through the wringer. “I thought, I’m such a soldier, she’s not going to hurt me,” Ms. Argento said. “But she did. She knew how to push my buttons.” Ms. Argento referred to Ms. Breillat variously as “a tough cookie,” “a great intellectual,” “a control freak,” “like my mother” and “a crazy bitch.” Ms. Breillat, sitting a few tables away at a Cannes restaurant, offered her own cool appraisal. “I chose Asia for her explosive subconscious, so I worked with her subconscious,” she said. “We had a few horrible blowups. She can terrorize people. She doesn’t like to be dominated. She would burst into tears and go, ‘Catherine doesn’t like me.’ And I would say, ‘Look, your tears are costing us time.’ ”
When the conversation turned to acting, Ms. Breillat spoke glowingly: “Put her in front of the camera, and she gives entirely of herself, body and soul, without any ego.”
Ms. Argento has been acting since she was 9, and she joined the family business partly as a way of joining the family. “I was shy and weird,” she said. “Making movies was the only time I belonged to something.” A defining moment came at the age of 5, when her mother, the actress Daria Nicolodi, showed her Tod Browning’s “Freaks.” She felt a strong kinship with the sideshow performers.
As a child she reached for the high shelf where videos of her father’s movies were stored and covertly screened them for her friends. As a teenager she started working with him, playing an anorexic orphan in “Trauma” (1993) and a rape victim in “The Stendhal Syndrome” (1996). Mr. Argento, speaking by telephone from Rome, said he was used to questions about subjecting his daughter to on screen torments. “I tell people it’s a movie,” he said.
Judging from the two features she has directed, Ms. Argento’s take on the intersection of life and art is more complicated. Her interest in confessional fiction backfired when J T LeRoy, author of the purportedly autobiographical tale of abuse, “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” was revealed to be the creation of a writer named Laura Albert. “On a human level I’m glad the story didn’t happen to somebody,” Ms. Argento said. “But I feel incapable of writing a movie now, and it’s a result of that deceit.”
After stints in Paris and Los Angeles, she now lives in Rome with her 6-year-old daughter (whose father is the Italian musician Marco Castoldi), but her relationship with the news media and the film world there remains contentious. “Italy to me is like the mean mother,” Ms. Argento said. “Whatever I do, it’s never good enough. People say I’m the queen of Cannes, but in Italy I get turned down for work.”
Her first Italian production in nearly a decade is a kind of family reunion. She stars alongside her mother in her father’s latest feature, “The Mother of Tears,” the final chapter of a trilogy that began with his 1977 classic, “Suspiria.”
Ms. Argento is very much her father’s daughter. “If I ever get too mainstream,” she said, “I feel like I’m neglecting his legacy.” Still, she has stepped out of his shadow, to the extent that “I think he’s kind of scared of me now,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Who is this monster I’ve created?’ He said to me once that ‘The Heart Is Deceitful’ is so extreme. And I’m like, ‘Look at your movies, Dad.’ I’ve realized that I also make horror films, but I deal with real life and not the fantastic.”
In that sense Ms. Argento’s true mentor has been Mr. Ferrara, who cast her in “New Rose Hotel” and whose raw, mordant brand of low-life poetry is a clear influence on her. (She has made documentaries about both her father and Mr. Ferrara.) Parked on a bar stool at his hotel in Cannes, Mr. Ferrara declined to discuss Ms. Argento — he would only say, “She’s awesome all the way” — because he was with his girlfriend, Shanyn Leigh, an actress who also appears in “Go Go Tales.”Ms. Argento explained that she and Ms. Leigh had a little run-in on the set. But, “I couldn’t care less about this friction,” she said. On screen for just a few minutes in “Go Go Tales”
