Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) might be in her early 20s, but she lives, resolutely and fretfully, in the past. She dwells obsessively on a formative childhood moment – a swimming pool accident, from which she was saved by the family maid – and tends to her grudges as lovingly as if they were cherished pets. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Amanda has no friends. She’s the kind of abrasively quirky character that might turn up in a Noah Baumbach film, here found in a mannered, deadpan comedy that has a tonal kinship with Greek weird-wave oddities.
Carolina Cavalli’s Italian-language feature debut shouldn’t work as well as it does, but this eccentric, eye-catching film about a lonely girl’s quest to rekindle the only friendship she ever knew – as two-year-olds, she and Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi) were inseparable – is as oddly endearing as it is enraging.