Rome, 1984. Aria (Giulia Salerno) is a nine-year-old girl in need of love. Her selfish and childish parents are caught in a furious divorce, yet they pay close attention to their careers — she’s an accomplished pianist and he’s a famous actor — as well as to their many extramarital affairs. But not a single minute is devoted to Aria. Better said, they do care for her, but only intermittently, when they feel like it or when something awful happens. Also, her sisters are always indulged, which makes Aria feel even more lonesome. Yet she longs to love and to be loved. At school, Aria is a brilliant student, but is misunderstood and often regarded as an oddball. She only has two beings to rely on: her best friend Angelica and her cat Dac. But that’s not nearly enough when she faces being continuously thrown out of both her parents’ homes. How long can she be the black sheep of two families, and eventually be abandoned by all?
Featured at the prestigious Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, Misunderstood, the new remarkable film by Asia Argento, is not an autobiographical account of her childhood, as many journalists have said. In fact, Asia Argento herself said that if she had wanted to make a film about her father (famous giallo/ horror director Dario Argento) and her mother, she would have made a documentary instead. Even if the lead character’s name — Aria — matches Argento’s legal name, and even considering the parallels between the actress/filmmaker having been raised in a dysfunctional family of artists, the fiction film is the only thing that counts.
And Misunderstood (Incompresa) is a painful film to watch. Though appropriately bittersweet, the bitter scenes are sometimes lacerating. This is a film almost exclusively about the growing pains of a childhood with little love, seen from Aria’s point of view. As a matter of fact, it’s not important whether her life is actually exactly the way it’s portrayed — the cartoonish parents are a bit over the top, for instance — because the point here is that this is how she feels and how much she suffers from so much neglect. So Argento expertly resorts to extremes to emphasize the experiences as lived by the broken-hearted Aria.
And, of course, Misunderstood deals with universal yearnings. Many of us have felt the pain of being cast aside, to live in somebody else’s shadow. And it is Aria’s persistence to be loved that resonates more deeply. Wanting to fit can be a terrible burden — and Giulia Salerno’s performance brings forth these feelings with uncanny simplicity and authenticity. Rather than playing a part, it seems she sometimes becomes the part.
Nonetheless, Aria’s life does have moments of bliss, and not just a few ones. Some of them are shared with her best friends, whereas others are created and enjoyed by her alone. And even being a cat, Dac is a most faithful companion. Also, the recognition she gets at school for academic excellence is no small thing. Argento is not keen on depicting the life of a victim or a martyr, so Aria’s parents aren’t demonized either, but depicted as egocentric, immature individuals who can’t and won’t take care of anything or anyone but themselves.
So this realistic switching back and forth between dark zones and luminous ones is one of the reasons why Misunderstood outshines films with similar themes. Another reason: you get to live it all, not just watch it.
