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Rating: Deceptive is the heart more than anything else. It's the title, translated into Italian, of the second film directed by Asia Argento, based on an autobiographical novel by J.T. Leroy. Set in an America with the underground, degraded atmospheres of Clark and Korine's films, but also Van Sant's (in which Argento starred in Last Days), the story is about Jeremiah, a child who follows in the footsteps of what can easily be classified as the world's worst mother, at least as portrayed in the film. Sarah, played by the director herself, is a junkie bad and sadistic prostitute towards a son who, first given up for adoption, manages to get him back and drags him along, with a string of sick love ("you're only mine," "we can only count on each other") and anger ("you ruined my life," "without you I would have become someone") in her wanderings from a new boy toy, a truck, a parking lot, and occasionally a house, making him beaten, mocked, and denigrated, and, at best, leaving him alone somewhere. The road movie of a reckless mother with a child in tow is interspersed with Jeremiah's stay, lasting a few years, in a kind of Christian cult, whose head is his own grandfather, portrayed as halfway between religious fanaticism and pedophilia, which outlines a cause-and-effect relationship between the deviant Christian education received and Sarah's behaviors. Despite the violence and harsh living conditions he is forced to endure, the love and affection of the child will lean towards the mother, in a relationship increasingly marked by madness, but in which the blood bond takes on a sacred and mystical significance that resolves in union, even in the most extreme condition, a union this time chosen and not forced.
The relationship between religious education, drugs, and mental imbalance is a recurring leitmotif in cinema (it reminds me of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin) but in "Deceptive Is the Heart" it seems an extreme exaggeration, linking the road/underground aspect to that of a B-movie horror, with an Asia Argento who from a sexy junkie becomes a madwoman in the grip of apocalyptic visions that very much recalls the characters and cinematography of Dario Argento. The character of the young and problematic mother is also a recurring theme but here Sarah's character does not evoke empathy or sympathy, and sometimes involuntarily makes one laugh for her exaggeration, which almost seems pathetic, and finds in her past stories only an overly forced justification. The point of union is certainly the mother-son bond, the figure of the mother in all its terrible and symbolic power, a source of love and suffering, but for which love always wins by virtue of that ancestral bond that is impossible to sever. It is for this reason that the representation of the maternal figure is intensified by mystical-religious references, here seen as a degeneration of a misguided Catholic education, which moves on the religious plane a controversial mother figure (but one should ask the director to confirm or deny this interpretation, or read Leroy's book to get a more precise idea). In a sense, a convergence between sacred and profane.
It is interesting to view the film in light of the 'character' of the real Asia Argento, whose public image is a smaller-scale version, or perhaps simply belonging to a different world, of Sarah: it's impossible not to think that Asia enjoys playing the part of the 'beautiful and damned,' in reality and fiction, feeding the aura that has been created around her figure. This ambivalence finds a comedic vein in the fact that, despite this, she is not good at playing the caricatured version of herself: her acting, beyond the external image of the character, which she embodies perfectly, is at times grotesque, because she tends to push a character already at the limit beyond his limits, exaggerating it and dropping it into ridicule, in an attempt that lends itself well to being read as self-referential.
Another point it shares with the underground cinema to which it seems to be inspired are the cameos of entertainment figures, each playing a brief and marginal role that enriches the universe of faces and people the protagonists have to deal with, only to leave them behind and continue on their path. The soundtrack, by Morgan and Sonic Youth, along with various musical references, is a tribute the film pays to the world of the underground music industry but also a stylistic embellishment—one of the few I liked. And Jimmy Bennett is excellent.
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