This year’s Open Roads—the 25th edition of the series that imports new films from Italy—opened with The Kidnapping of Arabella, the second feature by Carolina Cavalli. It stars the winning and gifted actress Benedetta Porcaroli as Holly, a bored 28-year-old who meets the eponymous 8-year-old and is convinced that this precocious youngster is her as a child. Although Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino (Arabella) have a believable older-younger sister vibe, Cavalli wastes a lot of screen time with their meandering and their meeting a collection of faux-Fellini stereotypes. It’s too bad that Chris Pine, who gives a committed performance—complete with serviceable Italian—as Arabella’s put-upon father, seems adrift in this context. 

 

Some of Italy’s best actresses populate several of this year’s Open Roads entries, starting with Elise, in which the fiery Barbara Ronchi—who was so unforgettable as the tragically sorrowful mother in Marco Bellocchio’s masterly 2023 Kidnapped—ratchets up her intensity level as a woman who is imprisoned for killing her sister without any motive, and who agrees to be subjected to a visiting criminologist’s study. Director Leonardo Di Costanzo intelligently explores thorny questions of morality and memory, and Ronchi’s emotionally bare acting provides the necessary grounding.

 

In The Eyes of Others, Andrea De Sica’s at times perceptive but often jumbled satire about the corruption of power among the ultra-rich, Jasmine Trinca is magnificent as an enigmatic woman whose arrival on a private island turns heads as well as leads to duplicity and ultimately murder. The film looks gorgeous, and there are some truly shocking moments, but De Sica is unfortunately more interested in stylishness than depth.

 

Valeria Golino impressively transforms into the dowdy, repressed high school teacher Gioia, who lives with her elderly parents and falls into an unlikely relationship with a mysteriously slippery student Alessio in Nicolangelo Gelormini’s leaky but watchable La Gioia. Although little of it is plausible—at least as presented by Gelormini—the actors are enough of a reason to watch: alongside Golino, Saul Nanni makes a charismatic Alessio and Jasmine Trinca (again!) does wonders in a largely thankless role as Alessio’s needy mother Carla. 

 

Ludovica Rampoldi’s script for Primavera—first-time director Damiano Michieletto’s tantalizing fictional biopic about Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi’s stormy relationship with a young orphan musician named Cecilia—smartly places maestro and student at the center of what is after all a Baroque melodrama. It looks and sounds sumptuous, of course, and Tecla Insolia gives a remarkable performance as Cecilia, making her far more than just another female footnote in a male-dominated artistic era.  

 

 

Rampoldi also wrote and directed A Brief Affair, a one-note comedy-drama about two people who meet cute one night and reluctantly fall into an adulterous affair, managing to keep their illicit encounters secret—at least until a couple of unsurprising plot twists end up bringing everything into the open. It’s all attractively acted by Pilar Fogliati, Adriano Giannini, Andrea Carpenzano and Valeria Golino (again), but Rampoldi’s derivative script and direction keep this from becoming a true guilty pleasure.