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Journey to Asia's heart - July 9, 2005STEPHEN APPLEBAUM ASIA ARGENTO SAYS SHE WAS LEFT "heartbroken" by reactions to her second directorial feature in Cannes last year. The sultry Italian had finished her uncompromising adaptation of cult author JT Leroy's autobiographical novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, almost on the eve of its world premiere on the Côte d'Azur, and was shocked when it was trashed by two of America's key trade papers. Variety, called it "a self-worshipping shrine", "self-indulgent" and "undisciplined"; the Hollywood Reporter talked of "a gruelling, cinematic excretion". Argento, 29, kept telling herself the critics were not her audience; they were "puritans" and "the sort of people who liked Shakespeare in Love". Rather like Tracey Emin, though, Argento blurs the line between art and life in her work; she poured a lot of herself into the film, so the attacks wounded. A year on, in London, the experience remains etched on her memory. "I didn't know what to expect when I went there and I was very fragile," she recalls in a smoky near-whisper. "I had finished the mix a couple of days before so it was sort of rushed and I didn't have the strength to fight back. After that I didn't read any reviews. I was very hurt. I couldn't believe that these people didn't get it." The Heart is by no means a bad movie, but neither is it easy to like. A child abuse story told through the victim's eyes, it follows the harrowing journey of Jeremiah, who is cruelly wrenched from his loving foster parents by Sarah (Argento), the messed-up mother who had him against her will at 16 and now, seven years later, has come to reclaim him. Still wrestling with her own childhood demons, Sarah staggers from one man to another, exposing Jeremiah to drink and drugs, sexual abuse and violence. She even makes him dress as her sister at one point. Those who should be protecting him, such as the Christian fundamentalist grandparents (Peter Fonda, Ornella Muti) and the social worker (Winona Ryder) who counsels him after he is raped by his stepfather, fail him. Everywhere, Jeremiah is exploited, threatened, judged and punished. Argento refuses to judge anyone in the film. "[Her] refusal to demonise eliminates even a hint of any moral point of view, making [the film] ultimately play like facile provocation," said Variety, apparently missing the point that some of Jeremiah's victimisers, including his mother, are themselves products of childhoods steeped in mental, emotional and physical abuse. "I always feel uncomfortable when a director is indoctrinating me," says Argento. "I want to come up with my own judgment, and I want the audience to come up with its own. Of course, as a person, I know this is bad, this is good, but I just want to tell the facts. "I'm interested in seeing how certain conditions force a human being into becoming something else. Dostoevsky used to do that. He wrote about characters that were considered rejects by society, like killers and drunks, and then he told the whole story so that by the end you didn't hate them, because you understood more the shades of life. That it's not all black and white, that it's not all depravity you're seeing." I wonder if what really upset some critics was the film's less than celebratory vision of America. Its juxtaposition of religious iconography and the Stars and Stripes appears to suggest the country's Puritan roots have created a judgmental and punitive society. Having recently read an on-line diary entry written, supposedly, by Argento in response to the death of the Pope, I ask what role religion has played in her own life. She is taken aback; she has heard about the diary but insists she is not the blogger. She did meet John Paul II when she was nine. But when she was approached to do an interview the night he died, she refused. "I was like, 'No, I don't buy into this shit. I don't want to talk about it or try to make myself have words like that for somebody.'' Her father, famed horror film director Dario Argento, has become "very Christian", she reveals. "As you get older you want to somehow relieve your fear of death. But I'm not there yet so I'm very critical about this. Any blind faith, for me, is dangerous." Like many Romans, claims Argento, she is "very cynical about the Church, because we know how corrupt it is. This American guy, to impress me, he paid a priest to have a private tour of the Vatican. This guy wanted me to wear the Pope's cap, all this weird shit, touch the remains of the Cross. You're not allowed to do this tour if you're Italian but this guy paid his way into it, and I had to pretend I was American. So it's kind of corrupt and horrible." The kind of corruption that appears to upset Argento most, though, is the corruption of innocence. This is why she related to The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, to Leroy himself and, surprisingly, to the character Jeremiah. "I never identified with Sarah," she says, "even though I played her. The point of view is the child. But it's not even the child then; it's JT Leroy today, looking back at his memories. The movie is like a memory where everything is not linear." In a new documentary, Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Love Me!, the actress alleges she was an abused child. Does she mean psychologically or physically? "I don't want to talk about that," she snaps. "I'm very upset with this asshole director [Yves Montmayeur]. I gave him my trust to film me because I was flattered by the idea that I could talk to the world. Now I've realised that it's better to guard some things. I've asked him to cut that shit out of it, but that asshole refused." Asia's childhood was certainly unconventional. Born in September 1975, some of her earliest memories are of watching horror films projected on the wall of the family home in Rome. Among them were Todd Browning's 1932 classic Freaks, which remains her favourite to this day, and her father's gruesome thriller Suspiria. The latter film has special significance because it was Dario's decision, made under pressure from the film's US distributor, to cast an American actress in the lead rather than his wife, Daria Nicolodi, that eventually tore Argento's parents apart. Following their separation, Argento found herself being bounced back and forth between her warring parents. At 14 she ran away from her mother's house, got tattooed in Amsterdam and busted for possession of hash in Rome. "That really freaked my father out," she recalls. "He took me in with him for the next three years. But he finally kicked me out at 17." She took up acting (against her mother's wishes) aged nine. Although successful, being separated from her parents, who were often away doing films, twisted Argento's personality. In their absence "the production would pay for assistants to bring me to the set," she says, "and they wouldn't care less if I was working 12 hours instead of four. I always had this pride, like 'No, I'm not a child', and I became kind of a tyrant. I felt I had to make sure people wouldn't step on my toes and so it became like a war. It f***ed me up in many ways." Argento accepts that it was her own choice to become an actor because it is what she really wanted to do. "But at the same time," she says ruefully, "it made me very suspicious about people and very hard for me to open my heart. Always I'm wary of betrayal, and whenever somebody takes one second from me, I don't trust them. So that has affected me for the rest of my life." When therapy proved useless she exorcised some of her demons with Scarlet Diva, her self-indulgent directorial debut, in which she played an Italian actress spiralling out of control in a world of sex and drugs. Her character's pregnancy anticipated the birth of her daughter, Anna Lou (named her after Argento's half-sister, who was killed in a road accident), an event which seems to have taken some darkness out of her life. Making The Heart, though tough, was a positive experience. She found she had a talent for directing children and now teaches acting to kids. To not be the kind of director she worked with as a child for the children on the movie was a "healing experience," she says, smiling. "It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done. I became a much happier person doing this movie. It wasn't what I was looking for but that's the result." What will Argento say to Anna Lou if she wants to act? "She's only three-and-a-half and she's already said that, because she's in love with Jimmy [Bennett], the little boy in The Heart. But I don't know. I would like her to have the longest childhood possible, and to live in this golden moment the longest possible time." Even so, she is not actively discouraging Anna Lou's interest in acting. Although she kept her daughter away from the Heart shoot, the toddler did get to see mum playing an ass-kicking zombie killer on the set of George Romero's eagerly-awaited Land of the Dead. Doing that movie "was very touching in a way because it was like working with my father," says Argento, who starred in several of Dario's films, including Trauma and The Stendhal Syndrome. It is a busy time for Argento, who divides her time between Paris and Rome. As well as Land of the Dead, she will soon be seen in a minor role in Last Days, Gus Van Sant's rock'n'roll death trip based on the final days of Kurt Cobain. And, in a complete change of pace, she has just finished playing Madam du Barry in Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette. "I admire Sofia. She's such a frail little thing and yet she's put this huge machine together. She is very calm and sweet to everybody, while on The Heart I was a monster, maybe because I was playing Sarah. I wouldn't sleep, I wouldn't wash myself, and then at the end I was so tired that I just thought, 'Whoever met me before this movie knows I'm not this person so I cannot switch her on and off'. "At the end, Sarah directed the movie, and I had to ask for forgiveness from a lot of people. So I hope on the next movie to be nicer, like Sofia." • The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is released on 15 July; Land of the Dead follows in September.
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