Amanda

Amanda

In the Italian film “Amanda,” the leading lady spends most of her screen time in an outfit that can best be described as Moody Teen: “Who, me? I just threw on this old thing, but did you notice how punk it is?” There’s a shapeless jacket, clunky boots and a vest that looks like it was crocheted by somebody’s grandmother. Mostly, though, she wears a sullen expression shot through with truculence, smugness and occasional vulnerability as if to say: I may be above these people I’m doomed to be among, but I still wish one of them liked me.

Eventually we see Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) lounging poolside in a bathing suit a jarring contrast that echoes the movie’s flashback framing device. In a brief look back at what made her this way, we see that even as a child her behavior could be shocking; what exactly she did to cause the maid to shriek her name and drop the tray she was carrying won’t become clear until much later. When we come upon her again, she’s in her 20s and has returned home to her wealthy family’s comfortable house after studying abroad in Paris.

She doesn’t want to join her sister (Laia Forte) in running their chain of pharmacies; then again, there isn’t much else she wants to do either. She knows what she doesn’t like and also knows that everything around her is beneath her. Her niece (Felicità Senn) and Judy (Isabella Ferrari), the same maid who dropped the tray now middle-aged and begged by Amanda to accompany her to a rave are about all she shows any warmth toward; Sofia (Monica Nappo), Amanda’s mother (and Judy’s employer), forbids Judy from going out with Amanda again.

Sofia has no clue what to do with her do nothing daughter, and hopes that getting her together with her friend’s do-nothing daughter will somehow yield positive results. The only hitch is that Amanda used to be friends with Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), the character whose Anglo-American name is now giving me such trouble. She won’t leave her room.

Comparable to Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the film “Amanda” is populated by idiosyncratic, articulate children who speak in flatly delivered aphorisms and are framed against meticulously composed backdrops. In her mid-20s but reflexively defensive like a teenager, Amanda is most herself when expressing dark sentiments or insulting people or violating basic standards of acceptable behavior, such as clipping her toenails into her mother’s bathwater.

What she wants more than anything is for someone to be her friend and for another person to be her boyfriend; but she has no idea how to show interest in anyone other than make fun of them. She loves the neighbor’s neglected horse she identifies with it but all she ever says to him is: “You’re too skinny. You look like a table.” She stares at an attractive young man with longing from across the street (she really does live in a picturesque neighborhood), but then has no idea what to do when he smiles back at her; then he goes out with someone else, and she’s hurt and angry. But she knows enough about herself to know that she knows nothing: She thinks of herself as somebody who can say things because they don’t mean anything. So this film is called “Amanda.”

The one thing that Amanda does right is Rebecca, though whether it amounts to much of anything is another question entirely. For all their spikiness with each other, Mary Lennox still manages eventually to coax some honesty from spoiled cousin Colin in The Secret Garden or rather respond honestly when he reveals himself first and I think something similar might have happened here if we were using the American version of this movie instead of the French one, which sees fit mostly just to stare into all these hairline fractures without necessarily being invested enough somehow somewhere emotionally connect beyond them throughout any further proximate physical contact stages as part either patching themselves back up again into wholes once broken apart by events still remaining vague.

When Amanda begins to soften, Porcaroli’s face lights up like a small gem but this isn’t that movie. Cavalli knows better than anyone how important it is never to compromise with “Amanda” as a character or as an idea about what people are like in general, let alone when they live next door; so she keeps things complicated until the very end, at which point she takes them another step further onward toward wherever we’re headed.

Watch Amanda For Free On Gomovies.