Chris Pine in Kooky Italian Film

Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), a troubled young woman, is persuaded by 7-year-old Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino) that she, Arabella, is a younger version of Holly who needs saving — when, in fact, Arabella just wants to run away to punish her father (Chris Pine) for not buying her tacos in the fey comedy-drama The Kidnapping of Arabella (Il rapimento di Arabella).

Partly shot in and around the Veneto region, this is the sort of quirky road movie Italian audiences usually love (see Dino Risi’s 1962 Il sorpasso for the one that set the template). It’s therefore likely to prove a real local crowd-pleaser when it debuts in Venice’s Horizons sidebar. Whether it has enough charm to bewitch non-Italian audiences seems less certain, even given the presence of everyone’s favorite American movie star named Chris speaking credible Italian and showing off his deadpan skills.

But it’s a bit icky to be making a farce out of child abduction, however vaguely this “kidnapping” fits that bill. Meanwhile, a young woman’s mental illness, which looks to the untrained eye a lot like schizophrenia, is even less chucklesome. At least, putting those issues aside, young lead Porcaroli and the even younger Guglielmino show off terrific comic timing while colorful cameos from an assortment of mesmerizing character actors, especially Eva Robin’s as a kooky aging showgirl, add sparkle. Still, this is evanescent stuff, hardly weighty enough to get mad about with respect to the aforementioned problematic areas.

The opening act has the most comic heft as writer-director Carolina Cavalli (whose debut feature was Venice Horizons contender Amanda) gets everything up and running. Pine’s Oreste D., an American novelist, and his deceptively angelic-looking daughter Arabella are first met in evening dress, on the way to an awards ceremony where Oreste will be honored. Arabella is furious that she has to put up with this boring event when she really wants to go to her favorite fast-food place, Taco King. Oreste reassures her that there will be other children and a giant puppet there, but she insists she hates both puppets and children, and needles him about how he’s jealous of novelist Jonathan Franzen’s greater literary success, a taunt that turns into one of the film’s funnier running gags.

After Arabella successfully sabotages the event with bratty outbursts, Oreste proves to be an atrocious parent by giving his limo driver a fistful of euros (it’s unclear whether he’s known the man for more than an hour or two) and instructions to take Arabella to Taco King to assuage her hunger. The similarly irresponsible driver leaves Arabella alone in the car while he goes to collect the order, so she storms off.

Making eye contact with Holly, who is sitting in her own car eating fries, the two young women connect. For reasons never quite sufficiently explained (something to do with “physics”), Holly decides that Arabella must be her younger self, and that taking the child with her would be her chance to fix the wrong turns her life has taken. Any doubts Holly might have that Arabella is not actually her are assuaged when the kid successfully reveals her name is “Holly.” (The clever moppet can read Holly’s name badge on the uniform she’s wearing, so when asked her name, she works out what the older girl wants to hear.)

By small increments, Cavalli and editor Babak Jalali (the latter directed recent Sundance feature Fremont, which Cavalli co-wrote with him) fill in Holly’s story. It seems she never knew her father and raised her emotionally fragile single mother, who’s now dead. If only she can track down the dancing instructor Granatina (Robin’s) she and her mother knew when Holly was a child — and who thought Holly was “special” — and get her to take on her younger self/Arabella as a protégée, all will be well.

Obviously, this is not a rational solution to her problems. But the destination is, of course, less important than the journey, which involves a number of stolen vehicles, colorful noms de plume (Holly checks into a hotel under the delightful name “Britney the Pooh”), and money-making scams like hiring out Arabella as a flower girl for quickie weddings.

Naturally, it all goes south, especially when Arabella tires of pretending to be Holly’s alter ego and just wants to go back to being a normal kid. One can sympathize with her because the film itself starts to run out of steam. Cutaways to bits involving sad-sack local cop Maccarico (Marco Bonadei) interviewing kooky characters like an effete server (Milutin Dapcevic) at Taco King and Oreste getting a dressing down from his ex-wife, Arabella’s Mother (Margareth Made), just feel like mildly amusing filler.

The core Holly-Arabella plotline might have worked much better on its own, enough to make a punchy-peculiar medium-length short, especially if the filmmakers had shed some of the unnecessary montages showing the two leads driving around in cars or hanging out in hotel rooms, the dialogue turned down and various catchy vintage pop tunes turned up so as to create a hipster music-video vibe.

That said, hearing Henri Salvador’s hysterical version of goofy novelty tune “Juanita Banana” is one of the more delightful discoveries the film has to offer, along with the leads themselves, especially adorable Guglielmino. Credit should also go to whoever scouted and dressed the deliberately dreary locations used, a selection of bare concrete architecture in what looks like the cheating side of every town.