Greetings again from the darkness. Asia Argento is a multi-talented filmmaker - actress, writer, director and producer. Her father is Dario Argento, well known for directing gialo horror films, and her mother is Italian actress Daria Niccolodi. Add in her grandmother, who was famed documentarian Leni Riefenstahl, and it's understandable why Asia has created (with co-writer Barbara Alberti) this semi-autobiographical story of Aria
a young girl struggling with self-absorbed parents and a world where she doesn't seem to fit.
It doesn't take long before we realize the film is poorly titled. "Abused and Mistreated" or "Sucky Parents" would be more accurate. Aria, wonderfully played by Giulia Salerno, is a very observant, tougher than we might expect, skinny kid who is fifth in the household pecking order behind her bombastic parents (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Gabriel Garko) and her two older sisters (Carolina Poccioni, Anna Lou Casoudi). Aria has a good friend at school, but is mostly an outcast due to her superior essay writing ability and her semi-famous, but rarely present parents.
Featuring one of the more dysfunctional family dinners you'll ever see, the filmmaker's deft touch allows us to pull for Aria as she is booted from her mom's house, and then from her dad's
and then the cycle repeats. Realizing that a connection with her parents (or sisters) will never be more than surface, Aria adopts a wild cat named Dac and proceeds to tote him everywhere. Dac's blackness plays off the color surrounding others – especially her flashy dad and always pink sister.
Being as this is Italian cinema, the characters are always emotional (sometimes way up, sometimes way down), periodically violent, and always passionate. Aria is the tortured young soul simply trying to survive this coming-of-age story with a socially and morally unacceptable parental structure. It's so apparent that with some semblance of love, Aria would fully blossom.
There are flashes of levity, including the dad's over-the-top superstitions, and the expert use of Lou Christie's "Two Faces Have I", that provide us a glimmer of hope. However, when Aria says "There are many ways to cry", we know those flashes and that glimmer are all but gone. Though the film is set in 1984, Aria's plea for us to "Be Nice" is as timely today as ever.
Plot summary
Rome, 1984, Aria is nine-year-old girl. On the verge of divorce, Aria's infantile and selfish parents are too preoccupied with their careers and extra-marital affairs to properly tend to any of Aria's needs. While her two older sisters are pampered, Aria is treated with cold indifference. Yet she yearns to love and to be loved. At school, Aria excels academically but is considered a misfit by everyone. She is misunderstood. Aria finds comfort in her cat - Dac and in her best friend - Angelica. Thrown out of both parents' homes, abandoned by all, even her best friend, Aria finally reaches the limit of what she can bear. She makes an unexpected decision in her life.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
August 11, 2024 at 03:25 PM
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Be Nice
Makes the familiar fresh
Argento has managed to transcend the trappings the ocean of coming of age/awful childhood films to create something odd, funny, sad horrifying, inventive and unique.
It's triply impressive because the heroine here is a 'poor little rich girl' – thus making her less automatically sympathetic, and she is clearly rooted in Argento's own childhood growing up with artistic, dramatic and well known parents. And it's very easy for such a personal film to lose its objectivity and simply become a scream at those adults that wounded you as a child. But by playing deftly with black humor and touches of the surreal the film mostly avoids self- pity on one side and the overly familiar on the other.
Yes, by the end watching spunky, sweet and sad little Aria get endlessly shuffled back and forth between her divorced and monstrously selfish parents gets a bit repetitive (although it IS all slowly evolving towards an ending – the repetition does pay off). And a few sequences don't work as well as most. But for every minor miss-step under Argento's adventurous hand there are a number of wonderful and very cinematic moments. It's a film I look forward to seeing again, and I hope it gets an English subtitled release on blu-ray or DVD soon.
Nine years old and misunderstood
Aria is a nine-year-old girl who no one seems to understand or want. Her parent's get a divorce and her older sisters are pampered by either parent, Lucrezia by her dad and Donatina by her mom. Aria is quite literally tossed between both parents, being kicked out of her mom's to go to her dad's then being kicked out of her dad's to go to back to her mom's and all over again. Aria's only friend Angelica seems to be the only one who understands her, but she too turns against her. Giulla Salemo does a great job at portraying a girl who only wants to be loved by her parents. Her actions show the viewer that she is sincerely attempting to win over the hearts of her self-centered parents. Aria does what any detested nine-year-old would do, she tries to impress her parents with her talent, which for her is writing. The story-line made sense, although it neglected to have a more elaborate one that is why I did not give the film ten stars. Also, there was some repetitiveness in the film that wasn't entirely necessary. Furthermore, it was overall an interesting film to watch.