Tag Archives: Asia Argento

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE STENDHAL SYNDROME (1996)

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 La sindrome di Stendhal

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Marco Leonardi, Paolo Bonacelli,

PLOT: A female detective investigating a serial rapist finds herself stalked by her quarry, while intermittently experiencing hallucinations when she looks at works of fine art.

Still from The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

COMMENTS: A little over halfway through The Stendhal Syndrome, Anna announces (slight spoiler) that she’s overcome the Stendhal Syndrome. She’s not kidding; she doesn’t hallucinate again (although her psychological struggles are far from over). Argento had used the Syndrome, a fanciful and dubious affliction in which viewers supposedly swoon into a fugue state when confronted with great works of art, as an excuse to stage a handful of hallucination sequences which, it turns out, were inessential to the plot.

The fact that syndrome supplying both the film’s title and its high concept would basically serve as a red herring indicates either a certain sloppiness, or an admirable disregard for conventional plotting by an auteur who’s always favored atmosphere over storytelling, depending on your point-of-view. Combined with the script’s predictable final twist and a number of superfluous scenes, I lean towards the confused execution opinion. There are other missteps, such as some clumsy and unnecessary CGI (pills down a throat, a bullet passing through a head), which comes across as the director playing with a new toy rather than as an element enhancing the story. All of which is not to say that The Stendhal Syndrome is a failure. It borders on the psychologically profound: Anna’s shifting identities and a recurring theme of gender confusion reflect a sympathetic, believable, and engaging view of a rape victim’s trauma. As always, Argento sniffs out poetic camera shots, e.g. Anna’s reflection trembling in a blood-red glass of wine. And the movie’s opening—a dialogue-free seven minute sequence of Anna wandering through Florence’s Uffizi, scored to Ennio Morricone’s deceptively simple, increasingly ominous theme, and ending with the heroine passing through the canvas surface of Bruegel’s “The Fall of Icarus,” then the diving under its painted water, where she eventually locks lips with a bulbous fish—is one of this director’s best standalone sequences. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie can’t live up to the mysterious promise here. The Stendhal Syndrome not quite the resurrection of the classic giallo form it might have been, but Argento fans will find enough spooky psychodrama to savor to make it worth a watch.

It’s awfully creepy to reflect on Dario directing his daughter Asia through the brutal rape scenes (though to be fair, she was only cast after a couple of other actresses, Bridget Fonda and , withdrew from the project). Asia’s acting here gets mixed reviews, but she has a classic beauty in three incarnations—regular Anna, tomboy Anna, and glamorous blonde Anna—and indulges in enough B-movie histrionics to carry the film. She positively shines compared to the rest of the blandly European cast. The English dubbing is atrocious, almost perfunctory like in a bottom-shelf vintage 1970s giallo, and the Italian soundtrack is recommended.

Blue Underground’s 2022 Blu-ray release is identical to their 2017 three disc limited edition, minus the DVD. Originally, this set shipped in a substandard video transfer; that issue was rectified and should not be a problem anymore. This version restores an additional two minutes of dialogue that were missing from previous U.S. releases.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as fans of the Italian horror director may have guessed, [the syndrome is] little more than a suitably arcane jumping-off point for another of the filmmaker’s bizarre examinations of madness, obsession, and bloodshed.”–Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle (1999 US release)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALIEN CRYSTAL PALACE (2018)

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DIRECTED BY: Arielle Dombasle

FEATURING: Arielle Dombasle, Nicolas Ker, Michel Fau, , Theo Hakola

PLOT: Hambourg is a demigod who has spent the past millennia attempting to combine a man and a woman to reforge the “Androgyne”; his latest experiment involving an elegant directress [efn_note]I don’t generally use the term “directress”, but I feel it important to emphasize the character’s heightened (and chic) femininity.[/efn_note] and an unstable musician begins unraveling as his project comes under the investigation of “the inspector.”

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Alien Crystal Palace is the Godard-ian science fiction sex film we’ve all been waiting for. Enough said.

COMMENTS: When Asia Argento plays the blandest character in a movie, you know you’ve found something special. I did not know this, nor much else for that matter, when I talked myself into staying up for the midnight screening of Alien Crystal Palace. Sitting in the crowd (and it was indeed a crowd), it occurred to me that I was almost certainly one of the only people not chemically altered for that screening. I needed no such aids, though, as Alien Crystal Palace took me by the hand into its world of drunken artists, coked-up conspirators, and stylistic anarchy.

I’ll dive straight into the heart of the matter: this is, by any technical standard, a truly terrible movie. The editing is choppy and seemingly arbitrary, with scenes clattering forward as eccentrically as the characters. The acting, almost across the board, feels like everyone downed a bottle of meth-infused Château Lafite before going on camera. Arielle Dombasle, starring as the urbane directress Dolorès Rivers, even tilts toward the wacky, despite her 130+ role pedigree dating back the to 1970s. Dombasle also wrote and directed this madness, and has set herself up as unflappably femme-française. Her counterpart—the yang to Dolorès’ yin—manages to be the most bizarre and frantic character in this already off-the-walls sci-fi thriller.

This is a paragraph exclusively concerning Nicolas Ker. As the actor who plays the movie-within-movie score composer, Nicolas Atlante, he out-Wiseaus Wiseau. He out-Belmondo’s Belmondo. When he’s not suffering brief moments of recuperation every morning (hearty swigs of Johnny Walker Red Label wake him up after another sleepless night), he’s always shouting at someone, something, nobody, or nothing. He rocks his dead-man heroin-chic look with a cranky aplomb, cigarette always in hand, two cravates always secured tightly around his bare neck. Ker is one of the co-writers of the screenplay, which I did not find surprising; I was surprised, however, when I learned that the heartfelt, wrenching soundtrack—which reminded me very much of the (British) New Wave band New Order—was done by this same Frenchman.

And now I must fall into a mad ramble. Nouvelle vague poster boy Jean-Pierre Léaud (Of Les quatres cent coups fame) plays the god Horus, father of Hambourg. There are a troupe of goth-gay “policemen” under the command of the snippiest / facsimile of a detective on this side of the galaxy. Lovers run towards, or sometimes from, each other in live-action slow motion to telegraph… something. When not enjoying his lush Egypto-pleasure hall in the heavens, Hambourg travels around exotic points  via CGI submarine. We learn from one of the three producer characters, “I’m not a killer, I’m an intellectual.” ‘Struth, never have I seen so much Frenchiness Frenching forth from a French movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is a mess. An ambitious mess…but mess nonetheless… As raunchy rock video, Alien Crystal Palace works well. Too bad they decided to make a 90 minute film out of it!”–Jane Fae, Eye for Film (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SCARLET DIVA (2000)

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DIRECTED BY: Asia Argento

FEATURING: Asia Argento, Jean Shepherd, Joe Coleman

PLOT: A hot young Italian actress has dirty sex, encounters Hollywood scumbags, and does too much Special K while looking for true love.

Still from Scarlet Diva (2000)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This semi-hallucinatory semi-autobiography, the directorial debut of ‘s actress daughter, is merely a curiosity, though frequently an outlandish and entertaining one. It’s made with all the taste and subtlety you would expect from a woman with an angel tattooed over her crotch.

COMMENTS: Scarlet Diva is an experimental art movie that wouldn’t have been out of place on Cinemax After Dark. Asia Argento, the writer-director, asks Asia Argento, the actress, to do full frontal nudity, multiple sex scenes, a lesbian scene, and a couple of attempted-rape scenes. To freak out in front of a mirror while tripping on ketamine. To smoke, drink, and get into a mosh pit while pregnant. To pathetically pine for a pretty boy rock singer who doesn’t have time for her. To imagine herself as the Virgin Mary. Asia Argento, trooper that she is, eagerly complies with all these requests.

Scarlet Diva is timely because, among its many unsavory anecdotes, it includes a fictionalized version of the actress’ sexual abuse at the hands of now disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. (In this version, she gets away, and he chases her down a hotel corridor as the camera focuses on his hairy ass). Yet that episode is only one of the many chaotic tales in this rambling confessional that plays like a trashy tell-all bestseller brought to life by an ambitious film student who hadn’t quite decided whether she wants to direct for the arthouse or for the late night cable market. So you get a hog-tied nude roommate, childhood flashbacks, a puking scene, dream sequences, a drug trip complete with an out-of-body experience, a religious bestiality icon, aerobics in leopard-skin panties, screaming into the void, an encounter with a horny heroin-addicted genius, Asia nude shaving her underarms while Nina Simone sings “Wild is the Wind,” and so on. And exchanges like, “That’s the first time I’ve ever made love.” “Don’t tell me you’re a virgin?” “No, I’m a whore.”

It’s pretentious, sure, but in the most enjoyable way: honest, over-the-top, passionately personal, and never boring. Scarlet Diva is not, by most definitions, great filmmaking. And yet, there’s an excellent chance you’ll find yourself entertained by it, in a guilty pleasure way.  And you’ll also feel legitimate pity and affection for Argento, despite the occasional clumsiness with which she makes the case for her own debasement. It’s better than a so-bad-it’s-weird movie, but it’s in the same general region, in the sense that it’s as often interesting for things it does wrong as for things it does right.

Film Movement Classics treats Diva like a Criterion-worthy masterpiece. There are tons of supplements, including an 8-minute “making of” featurette; an archival Asia Argento interview;  multiple versions of the trailer, including an 8-minute promo; and an odd piece called “Eye of the Cyclops” where Joe Coleman talks about his role in the film while showing us his titular conceptual art piece. It’s capped off by a very personal, even uncomfortable commentary track where Argento almost breaks into tears at times, curses Harvey Weinstein, and refuses to discuss certain painful scenes in detail.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is, by conventional standards, a fairly terrible movie — crudely shot on digital video, indifferently acted (in three languages) and chaotically written (by Ms. Argento) — but it is also weirdly fascinating, a ready-made Eurotrash cult object.”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (U.S. debut)