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.
All these crises and episodes don’t necessarily add up to a three-dimensional human being with whose emotional reality we can engage. Amanda is more an imagined figure with the anxiety of Gen Z and also the anomie of 90s Gen X, a character whose dramatic existence is located in the snappy dialogue she exchanges with other alienated characters. Amanda and her story are none the less amusing for being so contrived.
It is a movie that sustains its own very stylish and confident language, and I liked Amanda’s tricky relationship with her elder sister Marina – in fact, the nearest this film has to a recognisably human relationship. It appears Marina looked with unconcern as a child on Amanda’s near-drowning incident in the pool but is not especially guilty. She now has a little daughter called Stella who seems to have that quirkiness which Amanda should have outgrown. It is a film of style and surface, and these are cleverly created and maintained.
• Amanda screens at the Venice film festival.
