‘The Kidnapping of Arabella’ Review: Chris Pine Speaks Fluent Italian in a Quirky Road Movie That Offers Equally Unexpected Surprises at Every Turn

Carolina Cavalli’s “The Kidnapping of Arabella” opens with one of the single most surprising things I’ve seen and/or heard in a movie this year: Chris Pine, swagged out in a skin-tight suit that makes him look like a yassified Nick Cave, seething with jealousy over Jonathan Franzen in seemingly perfect Italian.

As I understand it, the Los Angeles-born actor began studying the language because he wanted to be cast in an Italian film, as opposed to being cast in an Italian film that required him to study the language. Mission accomplished!

Better yet, the unexpected nature of Pine’s casting performs a crucial service for the eccentric and playfully contrived road trip misadventure in which he’s been cast: Once you accept that the guy from “Dungeons & Dragons” could successfully moonlight as the next breakout star of commedie all’italiana, even the most far-fetched aspects of Cavalli’s film demand to be taken at face value. That buy-in proves essential to a movie whose premise requires you to suspend every iota of your disbelief, lest its Lanthimos-lite approach to child abduction curdle into something much darker.

The child in question is seven-year-old Arabella (a wonderful Lucrezia Guglielmino, brimming with puckish sincerity), the eldest and only child of the writer Oreste D. — a conspicuous character name in a film that’s being released opposite “The Odyssey.” Does little Arabella care about going to another stuffy awards dinner with her pompous dad? She does not. The only thing Arabella cares about is going to a local fast food restaurant called Taco King. Eventually, she complains enough that Oreste D. tasks his driver with taking her there, if only so he can have a few moments of peace. 

No such luck. Unsupervised in the parking lot outside Taco King, Arabella is discovered by a lightly deranged twentysomething named Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli, who starred in Cavalli’s debut “Amanda,” and bears an uncanny resemblance to “Dogtooth” actress Ariane Labed), who’s busy crashing out over her life’s unrealized potential.

Told as a child that she would grow up to become a great ballerina, Holly now works at a rundown ice rink in Veneto that she likes to describe as a gigantic frozen butthole. Cursing her crooked stars as she watches Arabella fake a limp for attention just like she used to do, Holly naturally leaps to the conclusion that this must be a “Big” situation, and that the little girl hobbling around in front of her is a younger version of herself. Arabella feeds this delusion by picking up on the vibe, reading the grown-up’s nametag, and insisting that her name is Holly too.

Arabella wants someone to take her seriously. Holly wants a do-over. Running away together is the only reasonable solution. “This can be our opportunity to become someone special,” Holly says in an effort to sell her semi-willing captive on the whole idea,” and Cavalli’s offbeat character piece takes its heroine at her word. “The Kidnapping of Arabella” might cleave a bit closer in tone (dry) and humor (deadpan) to the likes of “Napoleon Dynamite” or Babak Jalali’s recent Sundance gem “Fremont” (which Cavalli co-wrote, a collaboration that continues with Jalali serving as editor here), but its pace honors the freewheeling spirit of Italian classics like “Il Sorpasso.” 

In this case, that doesn’t mean “fast” so much as “erratically picaresque,” as Holly and Arabella crash weddings for a sense of belonging, stay at a motel under the alias “Brittany the Pooh,” and then later shack up in a spare room with a deaf goat. There’s an archness to all of these interludes that can fall flat whenever the film swerves back to its supporting characters (which include a cop sympathetic to Holly’s cause, and Oreste D. himself, who spends the rest of the story crying into a sex worker’s lap while mordantly contemplating suicide), but Porcaroli and Guglielmino are both spiky enough to resist the temptation for monotone, and the jaunty soundtrack layers everything with a casual patina of cool that keeps the movie from tacking too far in any direction. 

It’s a vibe, to be honest, and that vibeness filters everything we see — from tortured flashbacks to a hilarious visual gag that hinges on a “Lorenzo Lotto” painting — through the seriocomic angst of Holly’s self-frustration. Porcaroli’s performance leans into that embittered narcissism even when it hurts, but embittered narcissism comes naturally to a story about a woman who’s at least semi-convinced that she’s on the lam with her own mini-me, and there’s something ineffably tender and selfless to the idea that Holly doesn’t want the little girl to become “the wrong version” of herself. “It takes so little to keep you from living the right life anymore,” she laments, “and the worst part is you can still imagine it.” 

It’s all too easy these days to be tormented by the roads not taken, and while Cavalli prefers to set her film in an unspecified “anytime” that’s largely absent the trappings of modern tech (a choice that forfeits a sharper touch in favor of a more generalized charm), “The Kidnapping of Arabella” arrives at a satisfying destination because it finds a certain peace in the knotted fabric of space and time.

“Too many things don’t add up in this story,” Holly says to herself after seeing Arabella for the first time, but — like the once-ridiculous notion that, in another life, “This Means War” hunk Chris Pine could have been the next Vittorio Gassman — it’s always the things that don’t add up that that make our stories worth telling.

Grade: B-

“The Kidnapping of Arabella” is now playing in theaters.