The Kidnapping of Arabella isn’t about a kidnapping— at least, not in the usual sense. For one, the parties involved have their roles reversed. Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino, a great find with her crooked smile and discerning squint), the little girl who’s supposedly captured, not only willingly goes with her captor— she begs her to take her, so long as they are going anywhere but where they are (the “where” in this case being the dimly-lit parking lot of a Taco King). And the supposed captor, 28-year-old Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), only reluctantly acquiesces after she recognizes a strange quirk in Arabella: she pretends to have a limp, a tactic Holly would employ when she was that age to get out of doing things she didn’t want to do. Holly immediately jumps to a jarringly extreme conclusion: that the dimensions of time and space have folded, and the little girl standing in front of her now a past incarnation of herself. But don’t fear— this isn’t about time travel either.
The dual opening prologues of writer and director Carolina Cavalli’s sophomore feature briefly details the day these two girls had before their chance encounter, and by extension, the different worlds they come from. When we meet Arabella, she’s throwing a fit on the side of the road, refusing her exhausted father’s (a wonderfully greasy Chris Pine) commands to get into the car. He’s a writer, although perhaps not an especially success one (Arabella accuses him of envying Jonathan Franzen), and they’re on the way to a banquet at which he is speaking, but when they are there, Arabella— with the sort of unrelenting meanness that’s exhibited by spoiled children who are accustomed to always getting what they want— mercilessly heckles him. Wearily, he pays a driver to take her wherever she wants to go, and bring her home at the end of the evening. Holly, meanwhile, is let go from her job at an ice rink after a series of tiny inconveniences lead to her waterboarding a customer. She’s kicked out of the room she’s staying in, and ends up at the Taco King, where she cons the twitchy man behind the counter (Milutin Dapcevic) into giving her free French fries.
Arabella— playing along with Holly’s notion that she’s the younger Holly— and Holly’s journey across Italy fast becomes a Paper Moon-like odyssey, the two quick-thinkers pulling scams for fast cash, like charging starry-eyed couples for the use of Arabella as a flower girl in their weddings at a local chapel, building a relationship based on mutual need and begrudging respect in the process. Cavalli’s first feature, 2022’s Amanda (which also starred Porcaroli), made abundant use of deadpan humor, voiceover, and fantastical interludes to relay the coming-of-age tale of a disaffected and lonely upper class early twenty-something. She applies that style here as well, although it reads as less sharp (The Kidnapping of Arabella, like Amanda, is very much a you will either get the humor or you won’t situation) and more melancholic, the script a bit less focused as it initially tracks both girls, as well as occasionally cutting away to the film’s wider ensemble (Pine’s father, and a tender policeman played by Marco Bonadei who has a crush on Holly) before ultimately abandoning Arabella to zero in on Holly. But while that makes Arabella’s side of the story frustratingly inconclusive, it soon becomes clear that this isn’t about Arabella either.
Cavalli has a great eye for absurdity— she lingers on the human-sized chicken puppets sitting at the kids’ table with Arabella at dinner, on the karaoke machine that gets stuck on one song lyric, on an eccentric bride who invites the pair to her wedding reception, colorful tableaus lens by cinematographer Lorenzo Levrini— but she has an even greater eye for what it’s like to be a girl, at any age. There’s a lovely sequence late in the film where Holly and Arabella have made their stop for the night, and Arabella befriends a local boy her age. She excitedly jumps to conclusions about the nature of their friendship, but when she meets him later on to play with the other kids, her volatile confidence finally cracks, and as she hesitantly lingers on the perimeter of the group, making plain that she doesn’t have any friends her age— any friends at all, really. It provides the sort of deeper insight into her character that the rest of the film lacks.
But Arabella does have Holly— or rather, as she phrases it, Holly needs her. And Holly, vividly realized via Porcaroli’s outward grit barely masking her perpetually simmering frustration and despair, is the sort of aimless and lonely late twenty-something that we can all recognize, or have been, sitting at that uncomfortable age where she’s indisputably an adult, but not mature even to understand what she wants to do and who she wants to be. Caring for Arabella, and by extension, reconnecting with her younger self, grants her some renewed sense of purpose, an opportunity to start over. She has two lines in the film that cut through a script that is sometimes as meandering as their road trip and pierce straight to the heart. When Arabella— who’s tempted to engage in more serious crimes than Holly, who never ventures beyond swiping a few cans of food at the supermarket— crosses a line with a family who invites them into their home, Holly berates her: “Do you know how hard it is to be accepted?” And at the end of the film, there’s this: “It takes too little to keep you from living the right life now.” It’s a moving capper, because The Kidnapping of Arabella is actually about carving out a spot you’re content with in a world where you’re always fighting against the current, and realizing that what you believed was the wrong version of yourself was the right one all along.
The Kidnapping of Arabella had its world premiere in the Orrizonti section of the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Runtime: 107 minutes.
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