An Italian road trip movie with a bratty young passenger.
“The Kidnapping of Arabella” is an Italian film and the first to have Chris Pine speaking in a non-English language role, and he is very fluent in Italian. I think he might be on to something if he’s going to tackle on an international movie like this. The best dialogue he uses here is: “I’ve lost my daughter at a fast food restaurant I’ve never even taken her.” He’s not the protagonist of the film, but that’s not my problem.
My real problem is that the title girl Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino) is a bratty kid who wants to go to the fast food restaurant he’s never even taken her: “Taco King” instead of enjoying her novelist father Orest’s (Pine) speech and pretends to limp. Outside that very same fast food joint, she meets a woman named Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), who needs a new perspective on life. Being a person who studies physics, she believes that Arabella is her younger self, especially if she said she used to pretend to limp, which is why the youngster lies about being named Holly, too, and they both hit the road.
They shoplift at supermarkets, create a fake name “Britney the Pooh” when they stay at a hotel, and even have Arabella pose as a flower girl for a wedding. But the little girl causes problems for Holly along the way like holding a gun at a hotel manager and even stealing a valuable golden egg from a kindly family. And she doesn’t even know that the law labels her as Arabella’s kidnapper.
Holly wants to travel to La Creuz to reunite with a celebrated dancer named Granatina (Eva Robin’s), who always told her she was special and that she would make her into a real ballerina. Holly blew her chance at that, but seeing “her younger self” might be an opportunity to correct that error. She wants Arabella to be that ballerina.
I did laugh when Holly gets annoyed at a trial regarding a video recording instead of an in-person testimony (“How would you feel if you were on a blind date and that somebody was a TV and not a person?,” she asks). But the overall humor isn’t as elevating as the premise would suggest. A woman believing her younger self has come to her by chance might be a worthy concept, and Porcaroli displays the dialogue and emotions honestly. But the trip continues to prove what a child Arabella really is.
“The Kidnapping of Arabella” is the second film Carolina Cavalli has made after guiding Porcaroli in the title role of “Amanda,” and these two seem to have better chemistry than they do with the kid. I don’t watch international films to see kids wanting to go to fast food restaurants, and even in the genre, there still can be annoying kids. It’s still great to hear Pine speak Italian and take a different approach to his acting, but when it comes to the father-daughter story of this film, I’m not sure what to make of it. The better Pine movie of that sort is “Carousal,” which has him playing a father with an anxious daughter and a relationship with her debate coach. That film I saw from the Sundance Film Festival’s screening room and currently has no release date. But when it does, that’s the one you should be seeing.
Maybe I missed the message of this film, but there’s some good ideas for a road trip movie in this part of Europe. It should work as character development and an examination on a woman’s life, and it wants to. But it’s not enough to want something. It needs to speak for itself, and give Arabella a personality check, because even Holly thinks she’s a jerk, and I don’t blame her.
In Select Theaters This Week
