Insofar as Scarlet Diva is autobiographical, the message is that a goodlooking actress cannot avoid becoming a junkie and a slut. The author, director, and actress playing the title role is Asia Argento, a talented Italian who comes from a family of artists. The most quotable epigram in the film is “An artist is a prostitute.” When the film begins, twenty-four-year-old Anna Battista, the Scarlet Diva, is being interviewed in Locarno; she is asked all sorts of preposterous questions. Off camera, she is hounded by men who want to make love to her. Next, her work takes her to Paris, where she visits her agent and friend Veronica (played by Vera Gemma), who has been tied up for two days in an excruciatingly painful position by her lover Hamid (played by Alessandro Villari). While in Paris, she meets Kirk Vaines (played by Jean Shepard), an attractive rock singer from Australia, who sweeps her off her feet because he wants to “make love,” not just have sex. She also visits Amsterdam and Milan, experiencing more degradation, then on to London. In England, a famous photographer, Luke Ford (played by Vanessa Crane), furnishes cocaine to her while she is in a pool, and she nearly drowns. Then her agent introduces her to Barry Paar (played by Joe Coleman), who sweet talks her about producing her screenplay and starring in a film opposite Robert De Niro, and then he insists on having sex with her. When she goes to Hollywood to screen test for Paar’s film, Robert De Niro is not in the picture, so she realizes that he was only interested in another sexual encounter and walks out. On returning to Rome, her physician informs her that she is pregnant. Next, she goes to Paris, where the father of her child, Kirk, is performing. Eager to tell him that she is bearing his child, Kirk’s bodyguards tell her to back off so as not to intrude on his wife and child. Throughout the film, Anna is haunted by memories, the worst of which is how her mother (played by Daria Nocolodi, her real-life mother) died of a drug overdose. In the end she formulates a plan to “exorcise” herself from a nightmare world of illicit drugs and tawdry sex: She wants to become a director, which is of course what she is for Scarlet Diva. The many autobiographical elements of the film are best appreciated in the tabloids, but she has definitely made her point. MH