Amanda film review — Italian coming-of-age comedy oozes alienation

What fun is being young if you’re not annoying the olds? And pointed alienation is certainly the energy in stylish Italian comedy Amanda. As played with a cast-iron poker face by Benedetta Porcaroli, the twentysomething of the title is from a well-to-do family, her wilful lack of social life a constant cause of exasperation to her mother.

Early on, you may find your own teeth itching at the madcap deadpan with which director Carolina Cavalli portrays Amanda’s social isolation. So too the geometric sheen that gives the film a highly watchable look, but owes a little too much to everyone from the Greek “weird wave” of the 2010s to the fastidious hand of Wes Anderson.

But stick with it, and the flaws begin to fall away. For one thing, the longer Amanda runs, the more the model feels like a source both older than Anderson’s oeuvre and less played-out: that singular 1971 loner’s tale, Harold and Maude. But where morbid young buck Harold found salvation in a zesty octogenarian, Amanda makes a stab at it with another young woman her own age, still more screwed up, who may have been her only childhood pal. So begins a militant attempt to re-friend her.

The result is a film that ends up resembling nothing so much as itself: the passing grade of any coming-of-age.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from June 2