Asia Argento’s Scarlet Diva is like the cinematic equivalent of scabies – raw, skeevy, and more than a tad unclean – and I mean that as a compliment. The Daughter of Dario’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut wantonly wallows in the decadent filth of drugs, sex and stardom, following an up-and-coming starlet named Anna Battista (Asia) – the self-described “loneliest girl in the world” – as she aimlessly rummages around hypo-littered urban underpasses, strobe light-illuminated night clubs, and other assorted nasty locales. Its beyond-grungy aesthetic giving off the impression that Argento put the film together with a rusty chainsaw, Scarlet Diva is the near-epitome of narcissistic self-indulgence, an extravagant piece of me-me-me cinema in which the actress/director lavishes endless attention on that most fascinating of subjects: herself. With Anna suffering through one humiliating casting couch encounter after another, show business ultimately becomes the primary target of censure. But what really turbocharges Argento’s alternately insufferable and scintillating vanity project is her intimate familiarity with all that is unseemly, from the explicit sex that pockmarks Anna’s odyssey, to the sight of a naked woman left hogtied on a bed for two days by her lover, to Anna’s hilarious conversation with a gynecologist who, upon notifying his patient that she’s pregnant, reflexively follows up his news with the question “What shall we do? Another abortion?”
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