Italian Studies is an Atmospheric, Aimless Tour Through Amnesia

One of the best books on movies that I own is titled Walk, Don’t Run -it’s a study of the filmography of Richard Linklater and refers to his tendency as a filmmaker to let moments breathe, to meander and follow trains of thought almost aimlessly; and to take in atmosphere and conversation without much consideration for overarching plot. Fluid, stream-of-consciousness type stuff as in Waking Life or Slacker. I was reminded of that book and its’ evocation while watching Italian Studies, a thoughtful movie that is similarly free-wheeling and plotless as it drifts in and out of memory and experience, with greater regard for feeling and sensation than sensibility.

It was fittingly around this time last year that I saw Pieces of a Woman, the great break-out movie for actress Vanessa Kirby that earned her an Oscar nomination. And as her follow-up, Italian Studies makes a lot of sense; a similarly intimate indie movie that has a streak of an art film to it (much more so than Pieces of a Woman), and which often depends on Kirby’s particular blend of compelling under-acting -her ability to just effortlessly convey a deep and soulful mood. And indeed much like in Pieces of a Woman, her performance is the indisputable highlight. She plays a woman called Alina, a writer and journalist known for a successful short story collection called “Italian Studies”. And that is about all we know for sure –though even some of these details are cast in doubt.

Italian Studies is a dreamlike movie that follows Alina, apparently suffering from amnesia, wandering around the streets of New York (though it’s suggested she actually lives in London) interacting with mostly teenagers and young adults, or an apparent fan for reasons even she couldn’t exactly tell you. There are times where she’s aware of what she’s doing on a subconscious level and others where she is completely lost, unable to remember even basic things and behaving erratically as a result. But she absorbs all the comments and musings of her young companions with rapt curiosity.

The film is directed by Adam Leon, who’s had a couple acclaimed indie successes over the last decade, particularly 2012’s Gimme the Loot. Here he combines a stylized hypnotism, an immersive ambience with documentary naturalism, specifically in how the young people Alina meets with talk and behave. It’s recently reminiscent of C’mon C’mon, only with much looser topics of conversation, more abstract trains of thought, and of course these folks are more clearly actors. If the presence of a recognizable Fred Hechinger and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Maya Hawke don’t give it away, spurts of the more polished dialogue surely will –though to be fair, these don’t arise all too frequently, everyone’s still fairly convincing. These characters will appear in fairly artificial talking head sequences though, as if being interviewed, where they comment on their lives and feelings and ambitions. The most prominent is Simon (Simon Brickner), possibly Alina’s conduit to the others, a funny awkward kid from a broken home, whose own listlessness somewhat mirrors hers, and perhaps draws her to him.

But there’s a lot of ambiguity in this too, Leon not only throwing memory into question but identity and reality. There are scenes that seem to be mere dreams, others that could be glimpses of Alina’s past, the very writing process of “Italian Studies” itself –there’s also the consideration she only conforms to this identity because a fan recognizes her on the street. Could the fan be mistaken? It gets discombobulated pretty easily, any sense of plot or character thrown into flux, and while the former is of no importance, Leon does care something about the latter. It’s in that regard that the movies’ rambling structure hurts its’ effectiveness, and it is guilty of getting too caught up in its’ own confusions. I don’t know exactly what Leon means in some of his choices, while others are stark enough that they don’t need drowning out. It can be exhausting and often it is simply Kirby’s presence and her interest in each scene that carries through. Without her, the movie might be a slog.

Still, there would be fascinating ideas there. The nature of memory is what Leon is most interested in, what it means and what it makes us. Memory has a great effect on our personality and our understanding of the world, and Alina being bereft of that, suggests it is a barrier of some sort to our honest selves. And it’s a neutral barrier -Alina seems both liberated and isolated, and incredibly vulnerable. You wonder at times what is going to happen to her as she makes decisions and tries to get along without any caution or referential framework. There is every opportunity for things to get dark –particularly in these nondescript streets of New York. Certainly, hanging out with a bunch of kids would raise some eyebrows to say the least, the movie here perhaps equating a loss of memory with arrested development. But then she seems more open too, more curious –her experiences communing with strangers is enlightening, whether she remembers at the end of the day or not. It’s not a terribly ground-breaking psychological observation that our personalities and identities are informed by circumstance and social context, but the graceful way it is explored here is entrancing –as is the mood of the piece overall, which for its’ moments of haunting disorientation, is calming and meditative most of the way through. That nighttime New York atmosphere does a lot, as does the beautiful editing that nicely hides the turbulence of the story.

Leon is firing on a lot of cylinders in what seems to be a humble, limited movie. He’s dealing in multiple levels of reality and ambiguity as though fearful of saying anything certain. As you reflect on it, it doesn’t coalesce as well as he thinks -it exists perhaps in that strange realm of being both too experimental and not experimental enough. Yet there is something powerful there, whether it be in the serene flow or the compelling themes or the enticing atmosphere or even just Vanessa Kirby’s mesmerizing screen presence. Any of those things are perfectly enviable attributes throughout the indie scene.

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