A quirky, offbeat road trip and kidnapping dramedy, Carolina Cavalli’s The Kidnapping of Arabella moves through a variety of tones and genres in its relatively short runtime. Absurd, funny, and almost deadly serious with its moral implications, it’s a film that never fully synthesizes disparate tones while still managing an interesting little lark.
Perhaps the strangest decision, speaking for a film filled with them, is the casting of Chris Pine, who speaks entirely in fluent Italian as Arabella’s (Lucrezia Guglielmino) father Oreste and a novelist of some renown. When The Kidnapping of Arabella begins, he’s preparing to give a speech at an award ceremony honoring him, bringing his precocious and, frankly, annoying seven-year-old along. All she wants, however, is some tacos from the local fast food restaurant, Taco King, and to not sit at the party’s kids’ table.
Once there, her obvious boredom manifests in a series of outbursts, the oddest (and funniest) of which sees her screaming out the novelist Jonathan Franzen’s name, taunting her father’s obvious inferiority complex with the famed American novelist. Fed up, Oreste throws a wad of euros at his limo driver to take Arabella back to Taco King for food and bring her home. Once at the restaurant, however, the limo driver leaves Arabella alone. She happens upon Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), a down-on-her-luck woman who’s been hustling her way through life.
Noticing that Arabella is faking a limp, a trick that she used to use to get out of dance practice as a child, she comes to believe that Arabella is actually her younger self, sent by the universe as a means of correcting her past mistakes. She agrees to take Arabella along with her on a trip to track down her old dance teacher Granatina (Eva Robin’s), in the hopes that she’ll train the “younger” Holly and correct the wrong choices that the “older” Holly made in her life.
As the film’s title implies, Arabella plays along, making Holly believe that she’s a younger version of herself simply as a means of getting away from her father. From there, the film takes on a shambolic structure: Holly and Arabella drive around, stay in motels, and get into all sorts of trouble on their way to Granatina.
Cavill’s skeletal script has the bones of something interesting, with Holly tricking herself into seeing Arabella as a means of rewriting her past. Does she literally believe this child is a younger version of herself? Or does she see this more as a make-believe escape from her dreary life? That question lingers throughout much of the film, if only because Porcaroli plays Holly as a bit of a kook.
At one moment she’s overprotective of Arabella, and at another tells her to go play at a motel pool by herself. She’s not exactly motherly to Arabella, but it’s also clear that she does care about her. A prolonged sequence where Arabella finds a gun and treats it as a new toy is amusing in the abstract, but also feels discordant considering the film’s main subject matter.
Pine, pretty impressive with his language skills, is in far less of the film than one might expect, this character merely existing as a respite from the Holly / Arabella storyline. He intermittently appears to fight with his ex-wife or seek some type of solace from a sex worker who asks if he’d like her to read his newest pages to him. That scene is quite funny, but still seems to exist in a vacuum. This somewhat explains the entire project: funny and odd in individual moments without ever stitching these moments to create a coherent narrative or thematic throughline.
A kidnapping comedy has, of course, been done before, but the filmmaker lays on Holly’s adolescent trauma in a way that undercuts the quirkiness. When the film arrives at its inevitable conclusion and Holly has to answer for the fact that she kidnapped a child, it moves into an ending that punctuates the fact that she cannot go back in time and must live with the decisions she’s made. This is a poignant ending to what is essentially a farce. If it doesn’t exactly work, there’s enough to recommend when Cavalli swings in a number of different directions—some hit, others not so much.
The Kidnapping of Arabella opens in theaters in New York on Friday, July 17.