Benedetta Porcaroli won the Best Actress prize in the Orrizonti strands of the Venice Film Festival simply because this ridiculous movie would not have been possible without her spectacular performance. The Kidnapping of Arabella (Il rapimento di Arabella) does indeed involve a kidnapping but one in which we are not concerned for a second that the child will come to harm. Nothing that happens here is plausible in real life but boy howdy it’s a deeply entertaining movie, which marks writer-director Carolina Cavalli as one to watch.
I would bet five euros that the original script was not set in Italy, though, instead from San Francisco to Tijuana by way of Las Vegas. I would bet a further five euros that this is what brought on board Chris Pine, working here solely in Italian, as a world-class novelist and a mediocre dad. He has brought his daughter Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino, a live wire) to a celebration of his literary career, but he didn’t take her to fast-food joint Taco King first. Arabella is so mad about not getting tacos she deliberately sabotages the night and ends up at Taco King after all. In the parking lot, she locks eyes with Holly (Ms. Porcaroli) and offers her money to take her someplace else. As it happens Holly is in the middle of what we might call a mental health crisis. She therefore obviously sees the child as the literal manifestation of her younger self, slipped through time to enable her to repair some childhood regrets. Obviously. That’s fine by Arabella, as long as it’s somewhere else, so she gets into Holly’s car and the road trip begins.
After an incident in a cheap hotel where Arabella gets her hands on a gun, the kidnapping aspect of this odd-couple roadtrip is almost forgotten as cockamamie adventures pile up. There is no real world child who would be as indifferent to her parents as Arabella is here but it’s not that kind of a movie. Instead Mr. Pine is shown crying to a hugely bored prostitute who is mostly worried he’s going to read his novel to her again. It’s that kind of movie. The various wacky people Holly and Arabella encounter are so off-kilter the surprises keep us going. But really what we’re watching is a young woman and a child working together to repair a slightly fractured mind, without ever forgetting that none of this should be happening.
It’s a remarkable balancing act between whimsy and despair and one which requires Ms. Porcaroli and Miss Guglielmino to somehow be on the same wavelength. They are on this journey together because they both want to be, and the fact one of them is eight and not in contact with her parents is almost by the by. And Ms. Cavalli’s enormous achievement is that nothing in this movie is nearly as insane as it sounds. This is not the greatest movie ever made, but without Ms. Porcaroli’s commitment to the bit it would have been impossible. Therefore anyone interested in acting needs to study The Kidnapping of Arabella to see just how far one great performance can take you.
The Kidnapping of Arabella (Il rapimento di Arabella) recently played at the Venice International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Venice site for the title.
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