Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 15, 2014 2:19 pm 
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For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.

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CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG AND GIULIA SALERNO IN MISUNDERSTOOD

Growing up ignored and mistreated, with rich and famous parents: Asia Argento's boisterous, loud, semi-autobiographical effort is endlessly vivid but lacks real substance

Asia Argento, daughter of Dario, was seen on the screen in person in the 2007 New York Film Festival's colorful and amusing Main Slate selection, Catherine Breillat's costume drama The Last Mistress, where she played the lead role. This is a semi-autobiographical piece by Asia (the lead character, a young girl, only has one letter different in her name), where she has only a brief cameo. It's a more convincing directorial effort than her first two pictures, which have been characterized as "punk melodrama" (Lee Marshall, Screen Daily). Actually, though Misunderstood certainly has trappings unique to itself, in doing a tumultuous Italian language period coming-of-ager (set in the early 1980's), Asia Argento is competing with an entertaining and accomplished, if not radically original, spate of such films in recent Italian cinema including Giovanni Veronesi's The Fifth Wheel (starting in the Sixties), Daniele Lucchetti's Those Happy Years (about the Seventies), and Pierfrancesco Diliberto's The Mafia Only Killes in Summer, about growing up on Sicily in the past few decades. These films included in the FSLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series of June 2014, are just as entertaining and contain more historical context.

But the choice of Misunderstood as a New York Film Festival Main Slate film has the logic of a pedigree in cinematic history. Dario Argento, Asia's father, is the master of the Seventies horror film subgenre known as giallo, and she is his colorful offspring. Perhaps it's not any one thing Asia does, but how all her efforts, as actress, personality, model, singer, director, feed into a vivid and defiant life, fulfilling the supposed Italian renaissance concept of la vita come opera d'arte, of life itself as a work of art. Misunderstood is a vivid gesture, even if as autobiography or as cinema it may be a little more gesture than substance.

After seeing the film one wants to suggest Abused and Neglected as a better title than Misunderstood. The spectacularly egocentric and dysfunctional father and mother played by mostly-TV-actor and "heartthrob" Gabriel Garko and French icon (and herself daughter of a dysfunctional famous artistic person) Charlotte Gainsbourg take time out from their self-absorption mostly only to be mean to sweet, durable young Aria (Giulia Salerno) to the extent of frequently kicking her out or forcing her to leave their very soon separate households. The signature image this loud, punk, boisterous and colorful (but also sometimes underlit) movie leaves you with is the often-seen one of nine-year-old Aria dragging suitcase and cat-carrying cage as she tramps from one household to the other, or is temporarily homeless, hanging out with druggie street people and learning to smoke.

As Aria, Giulia Salerno is appealing enough, making for a lonely center of humanity amid the parents, their hangers-on, and Aria's unhelpful sisters, notably the chubby pink-obsessed Lucrezia (Carolina Poccioni), who goes to live with daddy when the parents split and lounges endlessly in her pink bedroom like an odalisque. Salerno's stand-in for Asia herself however lacks more emphatic qualities she has exhibited in real life as a feisty jack-of-all-trades with tons of attitude. Acquisition of that attitude is something that apparently hasn't happened yet; or maybe Asia has simply chosen the somewhat confused aim in this movie of choosing to make rejection and lovelessness cute. This girl may have a childhood like the director's was, but she's not the same person. The director posed at Cannes just recently defiantly flexing her biceps and showing off unusual tattoos. Nine-year-old Aria is a long way from such gestures.

These unappealing parents are a bit one-note, to say the least. Daddy, with his bleach-highlighted hair and fancy outfits, is merely an actor, not a notorious director, and we rarely hear anything about his work. Mommy is confusingly conceived. She is a classical pianist who annoys the neighbors with Rachmaninoff (you'd think the neighbors would be used to that, if she ever practices); later, she consorts with riotous punk musicians (a step too far from Rachmaninoff). Asia Argento's real life mother, Daria Nicolodi, was an actress.

This beleaguered girl in the film is skinny, short-haired, noncommittal, and always bounces back, sort of like the little boy in The Mafia Only Kills in Summer. The filmmaker's legendary feistiness and ambition lie on the cutting room floor. The "miserablism" of Asia's first two directorial efforts may have been turned to comedy here, but this ain't no bildingsroman. The young protagonist has survived, but you don't know where she is going. All we're left with is those dreadful parents, those useless sisters, and mom's fun and simpatico American punk boyfriend, the too-soon-discarded Ricky (Justin Pearson). Much better biopic: Joann Sfar's rolicking, phantasmagoric 2010 Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Eric Elmosnino is a perfect adult Serge Gainsbourg; Kacey Motet Klein is a hilarious boy Serge. Why didn't Asia try to be more accurate? But while Sfar might not have been a filmmaker, he's more of one than Asia.

Misunderstood/Incompresa, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in May 2014, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. In ten international festivals. Theatrical releases in Italy, scheduled also in France and Argentina.

(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

US release 25 September 2015.

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