Venice film festival: A wealthy young woman, friendless and lost after studying abroad, sets about recovering an old friendship she thinks she once had
Actor-turned-director Carolina Cavalli makes her feature debut with this elegant, angular contrivance: an absurdist existential comedy about an entitled twentysomething called Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli, from Netflix’s Baby) who has reached a quarterlife crisis.
Amanda has finished an unsatisfying period in Paris studying and returned to her wealthy family home in Italy, the scene of a near-drowning childhood accident in the swimming pool and the base for her extended dysfunctional clan. Like someone awakening from a dream, Amanda realises she has no boyfriend, no job and no friends. So when her mother (Monica Nappo) tells her that she once played as a little kid with a local girl called Rebecca, the daughter of her mother’s friend (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Amanda sets out with fanatical determination to re-befriend this now adult woman (Galatéa Belluggi), or to create the illusion that they were once friends. Rebecca turns out to be an agoraphobic shut-in, quite as messed up as Amanda, but this only increases her eligibility for being Amanda’s new best mate.
The film, like its heroine, is on its own spectrum of emotional bewilderment, full of looming closeups and wayward, asymmetric compositions, with something of Lanthimos or Kaurismaki, or the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino whose influence is obvious and who is in fact credited for his special contribution. It is a film that riffs entertainingly on details that are part of what is essentially a comically first-world-problem universe: Amanda is obsessed with getting enough supermarket loyalty points to get an electric fan which she can sell online. She even gets a temp job at an electrical goods store and instantly behaves with insouciant high-handedness towards her baffled boss. But does she really need the money? She meets a guy at a techno club (with weirdly few customers) and decides that he is to be her boyfriend, and moreover conceives an obsession with owning a horse that she has seen in a nearby field.
