After her original and eccentric directing debut in 2022 with Amanda [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Benedetta Porcaroli
fiche film], Carolina Cavalli returns to the Venice Film Festival with The Kidnapping of Arabella [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Carolina Cavalli
fiche film], in competition in the Orizzonti section. We talked to her about the relationship between the two films, non-places, the camp aesthetic and characters that reflect the confusion and disorientation of today.

Cineuropa: Is there a continuity between Amanda and The Kidnapping of Arabella?
Carolina Cavalli: I have an ambivalent rapport with Amanda, I sometimes feel distant from it, then I see young women in the subway or in the park and I hope so much that they have seen Amanda, deep down I’d still like to share it. I think there are similarities in tone with the second film, because it’s a tone I really like. I never imagined that it would be the same world, even if neither of them are set in really a precise geographic location, or an explicit time period, but at the visual level, there are probably coincidences.

These disorientating non-spaces seem to be a characteristic of your cinema.
I think that being in a kind of non-space creates a suspension of reality that gives me a lot of freedom in creating a personal map that can be useful in the story. I therefore feel completely free to invent characters and synthetise them in a more emotional way and not necessarily realistically. And the same is true for time and space. For the time period, there is also another reason: I like to tell contemporary stories but there are so many current dynamics that for me take us far away from the cinematic beauty of a story. This idea of not being exactly in the present therefore also gives me a lot of freedom.

A subtle irony and cult citations run through the film. Which kind of audience are you turning towards?
The audience is very important to me, obviously, yet when I write, I try to think about it as little as possible, so I don’t think I’m writing for a specific audience, really. But I always have a very clear idea of the kind of irony I like. It's an irony that is rather close to the absurd because I think it deeply reflects human existence, how uncertain and contradictory it is, and because it reflects well the confusion and disorientation that many people experience. I also think it forces us to discuss things that we usually take for granted. It’s an irony that is never detached, it’s always vulnerable, it doesn’t make you feel smart but it certainly makes you feel human. There is an aspect in particular of camp, understood as a style, that I like very much and that makes it always respectful and kind, it doesn’t make fun things but is always at the same level as things and it makes fun of itself. When you go beyond appearances, what at first glance can seem excessive and in bad taste is in fact a very elegant language.

Let’s talk about your collaboration with Benedetta Porcaroli, also the protagonist in Amanda, and about how you created this character.
Amanda and Holly are extremely different characters, but they have traits in common that Benedetta can manage in a way that I understand very well and love so much: for example, the way of telling jokes that are seemingly out of place but that appear very natural and make perfect sense within the story, so you never realise that distance. Or the ability to transform characters that aren’t immediately likeable and show their tender sides. I don’t like changing dialogues or certain scenes, but Benedetta had a lot of freedom to build this character, and it has been very subtle and precise work.

Why did you want an American actor, Chris Pine, to play the writer and father of the young Arabella of the title?
For me, it is always important to think that each character, even the youngest, has a life that has taken them to that point, and I thought about someone who’d had great early success and then lost it, and is struggling to find it again. This anxiety essentially removes them from the world, and they are only within themselves. Their priorities are connected to returning to something that they feel they have lost. I’d thought about a character that comes from another part of the world, because this created even more of a sense of loneliness and disorientation inside that world.