Friendship, for the titular Amanda, is an unsolvable riddle attached to a time bomb. That’s not a literal description of the conflict, but it suggests the panic and intensity on the young woman’s face as she contemplates the minefields of socialization in this quirky and engaging feature film debut from writer/director Carolina Cavalli. Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) is a 25-year-old still living at home because she’s not willing or able to hold down a job or make friends. Instead, as told in deadpan voice-over, she goes alone to the cinema every evening where she finds herself in staring contests with other solitary souls in the crowd. A prisoner of her own awkwardness, she finds no way to connect and goes home lonely.
It sounds like a case study of a pathetic individual, but the film’s light-hearted tone and self-aware staging of Amanda’s excruciations keeps the audience invested. She messes everything up, from her interactions with the ticket seller at the cinema to contentious dinners with her bewildered family. They see the young woman in front of them–outwardly normal if dressed a bit stodgily–and they can’t understand why she can’t seem to get out of her own way. In fact, viewers may share this bewilderment. With her perfect skin, gorgeous hair and Gucci-model physique, Benedetta Porcaroli is an unlikely actor to portray a lonely outcast whom no one wants to be around, but that’s also part of the story’s puzzle. Even the beautiful can be lonely, apparently, and we never really know what’s going on in another person’s world.
With nimble editing and buoyant musical cues from Niccolò Contessa’s original score, Amanda keeps the stakes low while channeling the lead character’s angst through symmetrical medium shots and close-ups. After learning that Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), a family acquaintance, used to be a close playmate when they were children, Amanda makes it her mission to rekindle the friendship and recover their lost years. The problem is that Rebecca is even more of an outcast than Amanda, having not emerged from her own bedroom in a year. Confronted with someone even more pitiful than herself, Amanda finds a sense of agency, and the film finds its dramatic arc.
Porcaroli skillfully inhabits a calculated approach to what ought to be a perfectly natural thing: being friendly. Amanda’s strategy for reconnection involves outright confrontation, which reveals something essential about her character: bound up in all her awkwardness and social ineptitude is a core of anger that makes for a fascinating engine of character. There’s just no way to know what she’s likely to do next in her almost animalistic instinct for doing as she pleases. In that respect, Rebecca is her perfect foil, one-upping the bizarre behavior and driving Amanda to recalibrate her approach. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that we get no hint of repressed trauma or any lingering secret that might explain these characters’ strangeness. A framing flashback provides a glimpse of an inciting incident, but no sense of a triggering event. These people are who they fundamentally seem to be, and the challenge is that they, like us, have to navigate the world with the personalities they’ve grown into.
Amanda‘s stew of psychology and charm bears stylistic echoes of the films of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, with the mannered goofiness of a continental Napoleon Dynamite in places. The characters are mostly wealthy and beautiful but misunderstood and undervalued by everyone around them, and so they get weird. Even peripheral characters are granted moments of disarming humanity, such as Amanda’s mother (Monica Nappo) secretly dancing to Juice Newton when no one’s looking, or Rebecca’s mother (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) trying and failing to cut perfect slices from a gigantic party cake. These are not the problems or behaviors of typical people, and yet there’s a bracing sense of truth and humanizing pathos underneath the way these characters struggle to fit into their world. Amanda’s increasingly desperate attempts to make and keep a friend are as poignant as they are harebrained, and maybe we should all be as invested in the things we care about.
Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
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