Across Amanda, Carolina Cavalli’s writing and cinematic style dovetail with lead actor Benedetta Porcaroli’s calibrated strangeness to express a sensibility that feels genuinely new. It’s also the rare film about mental instability (among other things) that doesn’t pathologize and reduce its characters to a diagnosis. Rather, it’s a vindication of idiosyncrasy.
The younger of two daughters in an Italian family that runs a chain of pharmacies across Europe, Amanda (Porcaroli) is a loner. While her harried sister, Marina (Margherita Missoni), has resigned herself to the family’s bourgeois responsibilities, the 25-year-old Amanda rejects them to the best of her ability, and to the aggravation of everyone around her. Her only friend is the family’s domestic worker, Judy. Amanda lives on her own in a barebones apartment but, without a job or an income, still begrudgingly depends on her family’s financial support.
Stubbornly opposed to her family and their milieu, Amanda nonetheless yearns for human connection, initially in the form of a boyfriend. One day, she becomes reacquainted with Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), a once promising athlete who, due to an unspecified psychological condition, doesn’t leave her bedroom. In their shared isolation, the two develop a defiantly peculiar friendship, hardly in keeping with their parents’ (or Rebecca’s therapist’s) expectations.
Amanda’s style is singular without calling so much attention to itself as to distract from the story. In this, it recalls any number of French New Wave films, such as François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, that put style in the service of conveying the subjectivity of their characters.
On her way to a “hard-style techno party” where she hopes to meet fellow outcasts, Amanda ends up instead at Judy’s nephew’s engagement party. Cavalli cuts to a medium shot, with Judy and Amanda in profile and one of Judy’s children sandwiched in between them in center frame, facing the camera as he toys with a soccer ball. Judy holds out a slice of cake on a paper plate and Amanda, after a moment’s hesitation, accepts it. Judy then offers her a conical silver party hat just as the kid attempts to balance on the soccer ball. Thanks to the flatness of the composition, his head appears to rise toward the hat as if about to be crowned. But Amanda characteristically declines, and the kid takes a pratfall, just before Cavalli cuts once again.
The sequence bears the influence of Wes Anderson, except that Amanda is devoid of whimsy and maintains no ironic distance from its protagonist, which isn’t to say that the film lacks for a visual sense of humor. The geometrical perfection of the shot crumples at the last moment as Amanda refuses to be absorbed into the party atmosphere, reflecting her contradictory impulses: She wants to remain aloof and independent, but at the same time she’s terribly alone.
From start to finish, Amanda radiates a sort of maladjusted charisma. She’s unwilling to pretend that the circumstances of her life aren’t of her choosing. Her face has the look of an employee forced to wear a stupid uniform, except that in this case the uniform is her bourgeois existence. Her every expression, her every movement protests against her class destiny.
Amanda is a coming-of-age drama that isn’t about relinquishing childish naïveté or reconciling oneself with the demands of society to become a “functional” member thereof. It’s about cultivating the sort of friendship that allows for survival without capitulation. Amanda’s is still an individual, bourgeois form of rebellion, but one that contains an inchoate kernel of solidarity—that which exists among unapologetic misfits. Through its depiction of her struggle against alienation and loneliness, Cavalli’s film consecrates a ferocity as refreshing as it is infectious.
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