Asia Argento

  • La sirène rouge [The Red Siren] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2022) I suspect that few people these days go “Oh, there’s La Sirène rouge! I’ve got to watch that!” but completionism is a strange disease, and there were enough fascinating oddities in the film’s creative credits to intrigue me. The biggest one was seeing that it’s an early effort from writer-director Olivier Megaton, who went on, a few years later, to make a modest splash in the Hollywood B-movie action scene by directing four mildly-received thrillers from the Luc Besson Eurocorp movie factory. (Of those four, only Colombiana was okay—The Transporter 3, Taken 2 and Taken 3 were all various shades of disappointing)  Megaton’s filmography has been sparse since 2014’s much-excoriated Taken 3, so it’s safe to presume he’s now in the mythical director jail. But what about his pre-Hollywood movies, the ones that presumably were the calling card that had Besson knocking at his door to direct? Could it be a case of “I liked his earlier, less-Hollywood stuff better”? Well, no: it turns out that La sirène rouge is of a piece with his later Eurocorp films: preoccupied by visual cool, but lacking in the narrative and coherency departments. He’s not much of an actor’s director either—the now-disgraced Asia Argento shows up here as a dogged police officer chasing after the daughter of a powerful mob madam, but her limitations are obvious. The script has a few surprises for Science Fiction fans in that even it’s co-written by Megaton, two other writers and expatriate American SF legend Norman Spinrad (what?!?), based on the debut novel from controversial writer Maurice G. Dantec, since then deceased. (This makes more sense when you find out that Dantec and Spinrad once played in a band together.)  Alas, that’s probably the most interesting thing about a by-the-numbers story that blends clichés without quite managing to turn them into something compelling. Some of the execution is better than the material, but not by much—the film feels instantly dated to the early 2000s through its overprocessed colour grading and some musical choices, but the sense of lassitude that comes from the dull action sequences and showy (but useless) directorial flourishes is timeless. A few good moments hint at a much better film if Megaton could just calm down and care about continuity… but the rest of La sirène rouge blares for itself as a disappointment. So yes—this is where Megaton’s pre-Hollywood creds come from, and no: he’s not some kind of misunderstood auteur.

  • La chiesa [The Church] (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2022). It’s a bad idea to place too much stock in expectations. In The Church’s case, it would have been easy to look forward to a gothic cathedral supernatural thriller featuring the involvement of both Argentos: Dario producing and writing, Asia co-starring. But keep those expectations in check (which isn’t all that difficult considering both Argentos’ steady fall from grace)—The Church occasionally works in small moments, interesting images and potential ideas, but falters in many crucial areas. The pacing is deathly slow, for instance—with far too much time spent explaining a historical prologue that’s not that interesting when measured against contemporary events. (This is a surprisingly common issue in staging elaborate historical flashbacks to show what could be a few lines of dialogue—they can work as supplemental visuals to audio, but it’s wasteful when they restage things without adding or contradicting anything said in the current day.)  While director Michele Soavi stages an acceptable amount of mayhem with characters going violently crazy under the influence of the cursed church, the film barely works itself up in a climactic frenzy: even the coda is depressingly ordinary. While The Church has enough good moments to avoid anything like a bad rating, it mishandles its own potential—considering how crazy and in-your-face the film gets about sacrilegious depictions of a Catholic cathedral, the film should have reached a feverish pace far earlier. Too bad—but then again, my expectations were modest.

  • Trauma (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) There are a few reasons why Trauma feels like an odd duck in the Dario Argento filmography, the biggest being that it’s clearly shot in the United States (Minneapolis, specifically). It also feels curiously restrained by Argento’s standards, the writer-director going for a more suspenseful, less gory approach in his bid to approach the American market. This being said, “Restrained by Argento’s standards” is a very relative thing when the film is a slasher movie with a psychopath running around with a decapitating device. There’s some noteworthiness in having Argento direct daughter Asia Argento in a leading role, although more questions are raised than answered when she (a teenager as of filming) ends up in a topless scene. The rest of Trauma is more annoying than anything else—it’s a slasher without the over-the-top nature of Argento’s best work, the final revelations are preposterous and the film errs into unintentional comedy far too often. Add to that the throwaway nature of slashers and there’s not much left to recommend here. At best, Trauma is a curio featuring the Argentos in America. At worse, it will put you to sleep so thoroughly that you’ll end up watching the ending twice.

  • La terza madre [Mother of Tears] (2007)

    La terza madre [Mother of Tears] (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) It’s hardly controversial to state that not all of Dario Argento’s films are created equal, and that his early films are better-crafted than the ones made after (roughly) 1990. It does Mother of Tears no favours whatsoever that it sets itself up as the concluding instalment of a series launched by nothing less than Suspiria (a giallo that even a slasher-hater like myself can like) and Inferno — no film could possibly aspire to follow up those two opening films and get good reviews. Indeed, other than a few rare moments and an ambitious apocalyptic plot, there isn’t much in Mother of Tears to impress. The plotting is crazy, but the execution feels far less audacious. Even with Asia Argento in the lead role and Udo Kier hovering menacingly in a supporting role, the film struggles to capitalize on its own potential. It avoids failure with a few flourishes, but again the comparisons to earlier Argento are almost unbearable — what would the younger Argento have been able to do with the budget and digital effects required to do justice to this kind of wide-scale vision of horror? Tough to say, but we’re on somewhat firmer ground in calling Mother of Tears a disappointment made even worse by the unrealistic comparisons that it courts.

  • Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but—with Dario Argento writing and directing an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera with Julian Sands and Asia Argento in the lead roles, I expected a lot more. This should be familiar material for Argento, who made the stage a centrepiece of his 1987 film Opera—alas, without much improvement. Argento-the-writer’s decision to change the Phantom from disfigured romantic to rat-friendly misanthrope is a crucial false note, while Argento-the-director to go full-gore on material that doesn’t necessarily call for it is another misfire. Julian Sands disappoints as the Phantom, although Asia Argento more or less performs at her level. Much of the same can be said about Dario Argento himself—if you were expecting much from 1998 Argento, then you hadn’t been paying attention for years at this point: the director was a shadow of his own self by that time in his career, and while fans could hope for 1970s Argento to handle the promising material, what they got instead was 1990s Argento and his substantial limitations. All of this to say that, unfortunately, Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera is closer to comedy than romantic horror: overly gory, not particularly attuned to the possibility of the material and decidedly showcasing the director near his worst, it’s perhaps most entertaining by being ridiculed.