‘The Kidnapping Of Arabella’ review: Chris Pine and Benedetta Porcaroli star in quirky Italian road movie

Dir/scr: Carolina Cavalli. Italy. 2025. 107mins

It is never easy to steer the boat of quirky absurdism past the whirlpool of pretentiousness without getting sucked in. Carolina Cavalli skirted the maelstrom with some panache in her well-received debut, Amanda, about a solitary young woman with issues, but comes a little closer in her follow-up – another Italian-language tale about a solitary young woman with issues, again played by Roman actress Benedetta Porcaroli.

Cavalli possesses an impressive control of deadpan tone

One thing saves The Kidnapping of Arabella – which, like Amanda before it, premieres in Venice Horizons – from imploding under the weight of its own whimsy: the fact that there is quite a zeitgeisty message here about loneliness and the ‘meh’ pandemic. These adrift 20- and 30-something digital natives and their non-friends are the audience Cavalli’s film is addressing, alongside older cineastes nostalgic for the cool comic oddness of films like Stranger Than Paradise.

Just like Jim Jarmusch in his early years, Cavalli possesses an impressive control of deadpan tone. She needs it in this story about an unhappy 28-year-old woman finding a seemingly parentless 7-year-old girl in the car park of a fast food joint and driving off with her, because she believes that the girl is her younger self. (At some stage, it will occur to us that, interestingly, any other adult-child gender mix would have been more immediately disturbing).

Little Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino), with her golden curls, goes with Porcaroli’s lank-haired Holly willingly, in fact very nearly implores her to drive her away. She has a father, played by Chris Pine speaking rather good Italian, but he’s a distracted writer who his daughter delights in winding up. He is particularly sensitive to her jibe that he is jealous of Jonathan Frantzen. Exasperated by his daughter’s heckles at a gala ceremony where he is giving a reading, daddy sends her off with his taciturn driver to get her favourite Taco King meal.

One enjoyable aspect of Arabella, once the road trip at the core of the film gets underway, is the way in which a drab slice of the Italian provinces – actually the Po Valley lowlands of the Veneto, with their anonymous modern churches, motels and shopping malls – is made to stand in for the US-Mexican borderlands (towns are called given names like Santa Rosa or Santa Cruz, and there’s even a border crossing scene). The fact that the switch is perfectly believable is, presumably, part of Cavalli’s point about generational anomie and rootlessness.

When a scene has been milked of all its bizarreness, another follows, often featuring a new character with a weird face or a strange hairdo, or else a deaf goat. And yet this new scene is sometimes unexpectedly funny, even occasionally touching. It helps that most of Cavalli’s actors, led by the pitch-perfect Porcaroli, are more than just Felliniesque oddballs. Nick Cave lookalike Marco Bonadei brings real pathos to his role as a lugubrious policeman charged with finding Arabella. Italian transgender actress Eva Robin’s, an iconic TV star of the 1980s and 1990s, achieves gravelly depth as Granatina, the dance teacher who Holly believes was the catalyst for her life taking a wrong turn back when she was Arabella’s age.

The tasty production design is as deadpan as the dialogue. Wallpapers clash like roosters in a cockfight, a laundry room is tiled, randomly, with a pattern of piano keys. But there’s a lightness too. A Spaghetti Western influenced soundtrack by Berlin-based musician Thomas Moked Blum and Cavalli’s director friend Noaz Deshe canters along nicely and, despite some stiff framings, DoP Lorenzo Levrini’s photography makes good use of natural light and the golden hour. In the end, however, it is perhaps Guglielmino’s lovely, artfully artless performance as Arabella that will do most to mollify those who are uncertain whether to be charmed or annoyed.