14/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: Carolina Cavalli’s debut film about an eccentric 25-year-old woman looking for friendship is inspired by independent, American coming-of-age comedy dramas

Benedetta Porcaroli in Amanda

Loneliness was one of themes explored by the films screening in the 79th Venice Film Festival, offering up women (Princess [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Roberto De Paolis
film profile], Monica [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrea Pallaoro
film profile], Chiara [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Susanna Nicchiarelli
film profile], Blonde) wrestling with physical and mental isolation brought about by a sexist social system, their families, the Church or Hollywood’s celebrity world. We can now add director and screenwriter Carolina Cavalli’s debut movie Amanda [+see also:
trailer
interview: Benedetta Porcaroli
film profile] to these titles, which is competing in the Orizzonti Extra line-up before making its way to Toronto’s Contemporary World Cinema section.

The titular protagonist – played by Benedetta Porcaroli, potentially at her best - is a young, 25-year-old woman who desperately wants to be loved for the first time in her life. But Amanda’s upper-middle-class family don’t know the meaning of the word. They’re glacial and haughty zombies who are either holed up in their country manor house or in their pharmacy. Her father is altogether absent, and the director immediately makes clear that these are conflictual and toxic relationships between three generations of women. In Amanda’s eyes, only her Jesus-obsessed niece and the latter’s South American nanny are worthy of her respect. Meanwhile, she fights ferociously with her sister (socialite and fashion house heiress Margherita Maccapani Missoni, who’s perfect in this role) and bickers endlessly with her impassive mother (Monica Nappo).

We learn from a brief flashback that Amanda has spent many years in Paris watching films at the film library and that she’s never had a boyfriend. A hardcore, anti-conformist rebel dressed in outfits halfway between Heidi and a normal GenZ woman, Amanda is trapped in an adolescence she never experienced and spends her time on her laptop browsing Chatroulette, attending illegal raves and travelling to suburban hotels in order to escape her family. She imagines non-existent relationships with boys she’s met by chance (Michele Bravi, the singer who won the X Factor) and eventually thinks she’s found friendship with her mother’s friend’s daughter, who’s the same age as her, just as problematic, and whom she’s known since she was a child. In the cement and steel villa-bunker where they live, another lethal relationship is unfolding, between a mother called Viola, who’s completely out of her mind on medication (Vittoria Mezzogiorno), and her hikikomori daughter Rebecca (Galatea Bellugi). By way of some bizarre, elective affinity, Amanda (a Latin name meaning “ “he who must be loved) succeeds in drawing her new friend out of her bedroom. No man (or woman) is an island, as John Donne’s poem affirms.

Whether intended as a critique of the ways we relate to others in a hyper-connected world, or an observation of the complex nature of the female sphere in a third-millennium family, the film continually lowers the bar, edging towards the eccentric dramedy genre typical of so many independent, American, coming-of-age movies, perhaps hailing from Sundance. In addition to Wes Anderson, whose work the director taps into for her symmetrical shots and distinctive pastel lighting (photography comes courtesy of Lorenzo Levrini), the melancholy and irony we usually associate with Paolo Sorrentino, to whom Cavalli dedicates special thanks at the end of the film, are especially clear here.

Amanda is produced by Elsinore Film, Wildside and Tenderstories, in collaboration with Charades and I Wonder Pictures.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 05/09/2022: Venice 2022 - Amanda

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Carolina Cavalli, Benedetta Porcaroli, Galatea Bellugi, Michele Bravi, Monica Nappo, Margherita Maccapani
© 2022 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it