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xXx-Rated - August 8th 2002Asia Argento plays nice for Hollywood By Stephen Lemons With her ink-black hair, pale olive skin and the strange Gothic features she seems to have inherited from her father, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, Asia Argento looks like she walked straight out of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the sort of diseased, beautiful creature that might haunt grave-diggers in the night. At least this is the first Asia Argento most cult film fans fell in love with, the one who continues to allure and torture them through her performances in her father's creepy flicks. In his 1993 film Trauma, she's an anorexic teenager hunting the deranged killer who beheaded her parents. And in The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), she's an Italian detective who turns dizzy in the presence of great art, leaving her prey to a vicious serial rapist and murderer. For her father, Asia (pronounced Ah-see-ah) became a blackbird locked in a cage with a cobra, the game being to watch the blackbird's terror and then save it before it's eaten. But by the time she appeared opposite Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara's sci-fi sexploitation noir New Rose Hotel (1998), she had transformed herself into the cobra. Gone was the wan, ethereal siren and in its place was a cold, backstabbing hooker/con artist always on the lookout for a trick/sucker. Asia's next metamorphosis was into full-blown, man-eating whore of Babylon in her directorial debut, the now-infamous Scarlet Diva (2000), which has yet to get any real distribution in the United States despite its popularity at film festivals here. (Scarlet Diva opens September 20 at the Regent Showcase in L.A.; check www.media-blasters.com for information. But, until then, the closest you'll come to seeing Asia's insane coup de cinema is by renting it in Italian, without subtitles, from a specialty video store, or buying a copy on eBay.) Even without a cursory knowledge of Asia's mother tongue, Scarlet Diva is easy enough to follow as a hyper, Dogme 95-influenced example of celluloid psychodrama, with Asia playing a version of herself in a number of bizarre mise-en-scènes: Asia gets banged doggy-style by a large, tattooed man; Asia does a line of "special K" at a photo shoot and almost drowns in a pool as a result; Asia smokes lots of hash; Asia gets chased down a hotel hallway by a naked, screaming Joe Coleman, the brilliant "lowbrow" painter; Asia fucks a rock star and becomes pregnant; and so on. "Everything of myself is in that film," Asia, 27, explained recently during a sit-down in a WeHo hotel suite. "All of those things didn't happen to me, but there is definitely truth in it -- truth to people around me or truth in things that happened to me, but I manipulated them. I wanted to make this a true exorcism of things I didn't like in my life and business." Suffice it to say that this Asia Argento, offered up by the Hollywood propaganda machine in support of the adrenaline-spiked Vin Diesel action pic xXx, which opens this Friday, August 9, is not the Asia Argento of Scarlet Diva. Unlike that sweaty, unwashed doppelgänger, this diva is well-heeled and well-coifed. And in place of the pasty pallor and frenetic, Ritalin-jonesing behavior is a calm, tanned incarnation, elegant enough for a photo-spread in Harper's Bazaar. There's not even the hint of the wild woman of Rome, the spooky, schizophrenic femme fatale the Italian papers love to portray her as, or the uninhibited sex goddess who posed in the buff for the British mag Bizarre several months pregnant, proudly revealing the tattoo of a large, winged angel she has above her bushy mons veneris. But though she credits her work on this big-budget American movie as a learning experience, Asia says it's her daughter of 18 months, Anna, and not her role as Vin's sidekick/lover, that has resulted in the new and improved Asia. "Because Scarlet Diva was a very honest movie and very urgent, I think I was in contact with some higher force which told me what my life would be like. Just that my pregnancy wouldn't be a crazy one, but a good one. And the father of the child was there, even though he is a musician and I had a daughter as in the movie. It was very strange. It was like I saw this before it happened. I was reborn the moment my daughter was born, and my life became much happier and better," she says. "But the movie didn't succeed in giving me strength. Afterwards I felt even weaker because I felt, "Why did I do this? I'm so naked in every possible way in front of the world.' With my daughter I became centered and balanced. She gave me so much strength. She's always smiling, so that makes me smile too." Asia says Anna is just beginning to walk, and acts like a "Japanese empress," very bossy yet good-natured. Asia confesses that she hopes her little girl will not become an actress, but a musician instead. Maybe a pianist, because she wants "some piano in my life." The effect of motherhood is obvious in Asia's every movement and phrase, so relaxed and languid. But is this maternal, nurturing Asia the same one who claimed the sex in Scarlet Diva was real, though there's no penetration shown? "I used to say the sex was real," she smiled. "But it's not. Well, some of it is. Unfortunately, not the scenes I did. It was close. We were naked, and it was very intimate. I was just looking for the truth, in a very dogmatic but more pragmatic way." Asia's "conversion" to Hollywood is even more confusing. Not that xXx is bad for a popcorn-and-gallon-Coke pic -- two hours of pure, mindless entertainment. But at the end of the day, despite all the paper it's sure to stack, it's just a Gen X (or Y) twist on the old 007 franchise. Fun stuff, but you won't strain any synapses watching it. Asia is sexy and mysterious as the Russian double agent who helps Vin fight the guys in black, but only in the restricted, comic-book parameters of American genre cinema.
"I've done my intellectual, psychological whatever. I've done 30 of them. Now, I need to do something that's fun. And I really had fun on this movie. Every morning I was like a little girl going to school on this big American set. Sure, it was hard work, but it was something different. You can't do the same things all your life. Plus, I think this character I play in xXx is deep. You can see the thoughts turning in her head. The same with Vin. This is why the chemistry works between us, because we're not idiots."
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