Chris Pine speaks Italian, a young girl is willingly kidnapped, and a troubled woman tries to give herself a past she never had in The Kidnapping of Arabella, a unique and fairly moving dramedy whose lack of focus and momentum ultimately proves to be its undoing.
From writer and director Carolina Cavalli, The Kidnapping of Arabella (titled Il rapimento di Arabella in Italian) follows a woman named Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), stuck in a dead-end job wondering where her life went wrong.
A chance encounter with an eight-year-old rebellious girl named Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino), who is desperate to run away from her self-absorbed father Orest (Chris Pine), suddenly changes the course of Holly’s life as she becomes convinced that Arabella is her from the past. Determined to give the younger version of herself the life she never had, Holly sets out on a road trip with her new companion, while law enforcement and Arabella’s father pursue them.
Cavalli’s third directorial effort sports a title that belies just how unconventional her film is. The Kidnapping of Arabella suggests a European-set kidnapping thriller akin to the likes of Taken or The Vanishing, but Cavalli’s film is a stark departure from what would expect from a kidnapping film.
Adopting an offbeat tone and filled with dysfunctional bantering and absurdist humor, The Kidnapping of Arabella certainly does something unique with the barebones of a kidnapping movie, even if its arduous storytelling and laborious pacing undercut the effectiveness of its themes.
Benedetta Porcaroli, who won the Best Actress prize for her role in the film at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival last year, is introduced as a combative, quirky personality, unafraid to blackmail elderly women or pour a bottle of vinegar down a misbehaving boy’s throat. But Porcaroli’s Holly meets her match when she comes across an eight-year-old girl with a strikingly similar rebellious attitude toward the world.
After ruining a big speech that her father gives, Arabella is sent home via a limousine driver. On the way back, they stop at a taco joint Arabella has refused to shut up about since the start of the movie, where she comes across Holly. It is at this point that the film goes bizarre.
Cavalli introduces the audience to a protagonist in Holly, who has delusional thoughts about the space-time continuum and believes that the young girl she just met is a version of her from the past. Arabella, meanwhile, is startlingly unphased by Holly’s unusual beliefs and even goes so far as to play into them, willingly going with Holly as a way to escape her father.
From there, the film operates much like a road trip movie focusing on two characters who don’t exactly see eye-to-eye. Whether it be Trains, Planes and Automobiles, Due Date, or countless other films, this narrative structure has been seen before, but Cavalli keeps the audience entertained with the constant bickering and clashing between its two lead characters.
Lucrezia Guglielmino in particular delivers a stellar comedic turn as the young Arabella. She nails each and every joke she’s tasked with delivering and gives the film a sense of innocence and levity that juxtaposes Holly’s seriousness.
Unfortunately, The Kidnapping of Arabella steadily loses its way as its runtime progresses. In taking far too long until it finally offers a deeper examination of Holly’s troubled psyche, Cavalli’s film proves wayward and meandering as the two characters, seemingly aimlessly, journey from one point to another.
The movie is devoid of much tension, given the extremely peripheral roles that Chris Pine and law enforcement officials play in the movie. Pine, who delivers all of his dialogue in Italian in the film, appears sporadically throughout and wishes to be reunited with his daughter but never really does anything about it, other than visit a prostitute and mope.
His role in the film is unusual, especially when considering his relative star-power compared to the other performers. It’s certainly more substantial than a cameo, but far from a leading performance. Instead, it’s a supporting performance from a great actor delivering lines in a foreign language that adds shockingly little to the proceedings.
Newspaper clippings indicate that there is a search for the kidnapped Arabella, but the film never effectively conveys the stakes of the situation. Holly appears blissfully unaware of the legal danger she is in, while the police officer leading the charge to find Arabella is emotionally flat and hardly in any rush.
As the film drags along, even strong lead performances from and humorous arguments between Porcaroli and Guglielmino cannot salvage it from devoling into tedium. This is a shame, as the final 15-20 minutes hone in on some rather powerful themes that were hardly touched upon in any depth and with any emotional resonance in the preceding film.
For as funny as the movie is at times, The Kidnapping of Arabella represents a rather tragic story of a woman longing for a past she never had. Holly is disappointed in the life that she lives, but, in Arabella, sees the potential to give her past self a second chance - to steer her onto a course that will ultimately lead to a better life. While Holly appears psychotic in holding such beliefs at the start of the film, the climax emphasizes just how heartbreaking it is for a woman to go to such lengths and forego all rationality to have a better life.
The ending certainly stirs up some emotions, especially as Holly comes to terms with the gravity and absurdity of her decisions, but it is disappointingly too little too late to render The Kidnapping of Arabella a worthwhile watch. Cavalli should be commended for introducing novelty into the tired, over-saturated genre of kidnapping movies and tugging at the heartstrings in the final stretch of her movie, although neither attribute makes this admittedly unconventional road trip one worth embarking on.
The film opens Friday, July 17, only in movie theaters, via Oscilloscope. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.