Writer and Director: Carolina Cavalli
Chris Pine talks Italian in Carolina Cavalli’s new film. But its real star is young Lucrezia Guglielmino, playing the titular Arabella, who is unwittingly kidnapped by a woman believing that the young girl is another version of herself. Quirky and ultimately moving, The Kidnapping of Arabella is the best road movie featuring a child since Little Miss Sunshine.
Arabella is an overindulged terror. On her way to her father’s (Pine) literary award ceremony, she teases him that he’s not as good as Jonathan Franzen. She would rather go to Taco King than eat the fancy food at the fancy function. He promises her that she will be seated at a table with other children and a giant animal puppet. She answers that she hates other children and that she hates giant animal puppets, too. When he begins to read from his book, she heckles him with taunts of “Taco King” and “Franzen”. A giant animal puppet – a rooster – looks on askance.
Quite understandably, the father delivers her to his chauffeur, who then ferries the girl to Taco Bell. She wants the meal with the surprise toy, naturally. But while he’s in the takeaway restaurant, she meets Holly eating French fries in her car. Arabella demands to be taken away; indeed, she will pay for the privilege. As Arabella pretends to limp like she did when she was a child, Holly agrees to kidnap the young girl.
Except, Holly doesn’t realise that she’s committing a crime. She believes that Arabella (who tells Holly that her name is Holly, too) is herself, but younger. Holly’s life is a mess; she’s just lost her job and talks to her dead mother on the phone as she falls asleep at night. She tracks her life’s trajectory to one point in her past. When offered ballet lessons, which she was told would make her a star, she feigned a limp to escape dance lessons. Holly decides to take Arabella to the showgirl who promised to turn her into a ballerina to be adored by everyone.
On their journey, they encounter a whole series of oddball characters, each with their grotesque hairstyle, from the sad, paranoid worker in Taco Bell to the long-haired policeman who tracks them down. But by the time they finally meet the ageing showgirl, played with brittle grace by Eva Robin’s, Cavalli’s film has changed tack and now explores more directly themes of loneliness and broken dreams. The mood mellows, and the film is surprisingly poignant.
Benedetta Porcaroli is the scarred Holly, deluded by her imagination into trusting that she can change the past. She’s tough but only up to a point, as her odyssey only takes her back to the start. She learns a universal truth, but not the one she is expecting, a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, which, maybe accidentally, acts as a template for The Kidnapping of Arabella.
Pine has little to do, but his character’s weary, languorous intellectualism is funny. It seems that no one reads his books, and so he pays sex workers to listen to him reciting from them. His scenes showing the literary scene at its worst are nice asides when the real film traces the chase for self-knowledge. Pine’s author will never find it, but Holly does. Arabella is too young to care.
The Kidnapping of Arabella is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
