The talk of the festival, though, was her extended cameo in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, in which she plays a stripper who takes the stage with her pet rottweiler and placates the agitated beast with a big wet kiss.
What does the queen of Cannes do for an encore? Apparently, more of the same. After Cannes, Argento plunged right back into shooting. In De la guerre, directed by Bertrand Bonello (best known for 2001’s The Pornographer, which starred Jean-Pierre Léaud as an aging skin-flick auteur), she takes on yet another of what she calls her “dark lady” roles: a guru who presides over a commune and helps her disciples get in touch with their erotic and violent sides.
On the phone from the set — an old castle an hour outside Paris — Argento proudly announces that she has taken up residence there for the duration of the shoot. “It’s bizarre and creepy,” she says. “I think it’s a little bit haunted, but it helps me concentrate. I stay in my room and watch movies that have to do with this film, like Pasolini’s Salo, and I read books on trance and shamanism. I like that everybody leaves and I’m here at night. I’m the only one with the balls to stay.”
You sense that, for Argento, a significant part of the thrill comes from the challenge of difficult conditions and having the — er — “balls” to overcome them. On the set of An Old Mistress, an adaptation of an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in which she plays a Spanish courtesan caught up in a love-hate affair with a young nobleman, she repeatedly locked horns with Breillat, director of Fat Girl and Romance and a provocateur with a reputation for coldly molding and manipulating her actors.
Argento calls it a “once in a lifetime” role. “I’m very proud for being very ugly in this movie,” she adds with a laugh. “I have a mustache and big eyebrows. I totally look like Frida Kahlo.”
But working with Breillat gave her fits. “She’s an authority figure, which I hate. It’s what I rebel against in life. She’s so strong and she totally dominated me, and I kept all my anger inside.” Complicating matters, Argento developed peritonitis while shooting. “I had a three-hour operation, and I was in the hospital for ten days,” she says. “Everything was infected inside me.”
In Assayas’ bracing B-thriller Boarding Gate, Argento’s character is an ex-prostitute (“I play a lot of prostitutes and strippers,” she notes matter-of-factly) engaged in double-crossings and power struggles that take her from Paris to Hong Kong. The shoot was not as psychologically draining as Breillat’s, but there were athletic challenges. “I did a lot more of my stunts here than in XXX,” Argento says. “They don’t let you do anything in big-budget movies. Here it was all really intense, almost as if you could get hurt. When you shoot movies, you usually feel warm and protected, like nothing bad can happen to you. But it feels good sometimes to step outside of that, especially in an action movie.”