Kiss and sell

As well as directing, she cowrote the film, which is based on a short story by the appropriately colourful JT Leroy, a former male prostitute turned author with a penchant for female attire. Asia stars, too, in a quintessential Argento role, as a damaged, trick-turning, pill-popping mother in the American Deep South who has fled her abusive, fundamentalist father (played by Peter Fonda).

As the movie begins, she has just regained custody of her son, Jeremiah. Removed from his comfortable, middle-class foster home, Jeremiah - played at different ages by three actors - is less than happy with his sleazy, new lifestyle. But he eventually gets the hang of it and, in the scene that brought even Noé up short, dresses up in his mother's lingerie and seduces her current boyfriend, a gormless piece of born-again trash played by Marilyn Manson.

Realising that the actual seduction would have been impossible to shoot with a child actor, Argento takes over the role of Jeremiah herself halfway through the scene. But she is unapologetic.

"Sure, it upsets people," she says. "But I'm not saying this is black, this is white. I'm trying to treat the audience as a mature entity; they have to make up their own minds.

"It's a very punk movie. It has the rhythm and structure of punk songs. I used to listen to punk as a teenager. It certainly gave me a rhythm for the film - kind of frenzied."

Her cast of potential crazies adds to the punky flavour - joining Fonda and Manson, are Winona Ryder, Michael Pitt (who also plays Kurt Cobain in Last Days) and, in a cameo as a nurse, Seventies punkstress Lydia Lunch.

Against a backdrop of truckstops in the American South, Argento creates a surreal world of tawdry beauty for her journey through unhappiness, sexual abuse and drugs (she does a very creditable Southern accent, too).

The difficult subject matter, she insists, reflects the times. "I think the fact that Irreversible exists definitely opened the door for a lot of us," she says, "The best movies are like dolls: they talk to each other. I feel my movie is talking to Gaspar's movie. And, when Scarlet Diva came out, that movie was talking to other movies of the time, like Romance and Happiness."

Argento's career began early. "When I was nine, I started working in movies, smoking cigarettes, being a bit of a bad girl at school." Some of the edge must have been taken off the rebellion by the fact that several of her early movies were directed by Daddy.

Too busy watching a rerun of Gone With the Wind at his local arthouse to attend her birth, he made amends when she was five by showing her his slasher thriller, Deep Red: The Hatchet Murders. She remembers thinking how clever he was.

Her new directing hero is Sofia Coppola, who has just finished shooting a follow-up to Lost in Translation, Marie-Antoinette, in which Argento plays Madame du Barry. "I saw this little girl, so skinny, directing this huge machine of a movie," she says. "I admire her a lot."

That tough-sweet, strongvulnerable combination perhaps provides a key to Argento, too. The title of The Heart Is Deceitful comes from the Bible (Jeremiah, XVII, 9) and is intended as an abject reminder of where mankind has ended up thanks to what Adam did to that apple. Of course, Argento, while accepting this interpretation, inevitably takes the idea off in her own direction.

"The heart totally rules you," she says, with passion. "You're beautiful in your own heart because you cannot control the feelings that are wrong: you're totally dominated by them."

For Argento the bad girl, it's the deceitful heart that wins every time. "I always go with what my heart tells me. I have to. I've given up trying to get my heart to listen to my brain."

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things opens on 15 July, when Asia Argento presents a special event at the ICA (020 7930 3647) with a Q&A and DJ session.