Venice Film Festival Review: The Kidnapping of Arabella

Carolina Cavalli presents herself at the Venice Film Festival, competing in the Horizons section, with the film titled "The Kidnapping of Arabella." The narrative doesn't actually depict a kidnapping, at least not in the protagonist's intentions. Rather, it portrays a journey, a bitter adventure, where the protagonist sees herself in the little girl she believes she must save from an otherwise inevitable future. A journey in which she reprocesses her own regrets and missed opportunities, anguished by the exhaustion of a self-awareness that becomes instability. And so, a child's desire to escape, to distance herself from her father and family, intersects with the discomfort of a woman in her late twenties struggling with her own emotional crises.

The escape from a sense of inadequacy, from the need to be accepted, from the feeling of being the wrong one, leads the protagonist on a personal path toward awareness through her encounter with the one who becomes her small traveling companion, unaware of being sought for kidnapping.

The protagonist's restlessness, falling prey to her own need to believe in a second chance, emerges clearly in the narrative and meets the child's desire to escape—a child who simply wants to distance herself from a family that is too absent or insufficiently attentive to her needs, preferring to spend her time with a stranger.

Benedetta Porcaroli, Lucrezia Guglielmino, Chris Pine, Marco Bonadei, and Eva Robin's make up the cast of a film that received lengthy applause from the audience. The inevitably predictable ending does not detract from the depth of a bitter fairy tale narrated with intensity and wisdom.