Misunderstood

Rome, 1984. Aria is nine. Her father is an actor, her mother a musician, and both are taken up with their work, their affairs and their divorce. Her two older sisters are indulged; Aria is looked after by nobody. She does well at school and resembles no one there. Apart from her cat Dac and her friend Angelica she has nobody. Her mother throws her out of one house and her father out of the other, and in the end even the friend lets go. Aria reaches the end of what she can carry and makes a decision nobody expected. Asia Argento directs; a hundred and three minutes. Giulia Salerno plays Aria, with Charlotte Gainsbourg as the mother and Gabriel Garko as the father. Argento has said the story came out of her own childhood; the film showed at Cannes in 2014 in Un Certain Regard.