Italian Studies
A comforting frisk of a movie shot piecemeal between July 2018 and April of the ensuing time, Adam Leon’s independent movie “ Italian Studies” may be set along and consummately stolen from the crowded sidewalks of London and New York, but it’s unmistakably suffused with the giddy disturbance and “ we have to make commodity” life- force of a COVID film. No bone is wearing masks or social distancing in the heat of lower Manhattan on a summer autumn, yet Leon’s heroine — a successful author played by Vanessa Kirby at a time just before people on the road would fete her as one of the gutsiest actresses of her generation, or as anyone at all — is lost in a fugue state that vividly reflects the insulation and query of the last 18 months.
Alina Reynolds (Kirby) can’t tell if she’s in extremity, or if she’s just confused. She can’t tell if she remembers the world around her and the nonnatives she finds in it, or if she’s just imagining them. Perhaps they’re recollections, or characters from the book of short stories that launched her career, or kernels of the novel she’s just starting to write in her head. In lieu of a direct narrative, Alina’s hazy trip down the rabbit- hole and reverse is largely held together by the vague sense that tone- identity is shaped by the people we meet, and the places where we be to meet them. From the negative image of that idea emerges a question numerous of us have been asking ourselves since “ Italian Studies” wrapped Is it possible to be anyone in insulation?
Still in this independent movie, none of his plot-forward former work prognosticated commodity this loopy or fugitive, If Leon’s before New York stories — particularly the breezy one-two punch of “ Gim me the Spoil” and “ Tramps” — paved the way for the road- position genuineness that grounds his rearmost film. We first meet Alina in a London recording plant where she wordlessly radiates the confidence of someone youthful and beautiful and in full command of themselves. She knows who she is. In that light, it’s easy to appreciate her confusion when a teenage girl comes up to her and insists they know each other — that they hung out with a group of kiddies in New York one summer. She’s sure of it. How can Alina not remember?
That question is left unanswered (this isn’t a movie where someone’s memory loss is explained by a trip to the ER and some curious MRIs), but “Italian Studies” dekes back in time to show us when the amnesia started. We see Alina walk into a Chelsea tackle store one autumn, and also … well, that’s really each there’s to it. She just forgets herself. Her mind is etch-a-sketched blank, important to the chagrin of the little canine she leaves tied up on the road outdoors.
From there, the independent movie surveys Kirby with the help of Brett Jutkiewicz’s long lenses, crowds of unconscious extras, and a putatively generative ambient score from the brilliant Nicholas Britell as she wanders the megacity like a blinkered alien who’s No way been there ahead. The disquieting blend of fame and query suggests a less rapacious interpretation of Scarlett Johansson’s character in “ Under the Skin,” though it’s unclear if some of the people Alina hassles are “ real,” or if everyone is just made to feel that way.
Anyhow, the independent movie teenage cast is so credible that everyone around them feeds off their realism; we might indeed forget that Kirby is notorious if not for the fact that Alina has a fan base of her own. But the most important person she meets only knows her as another misplaced soul. His name is Simon (Simon Brickner, a major discovery whom Leon met when directing a live show called “ The All-City Hour Variety Hour”). He’s commodity of a toothy cross between Lucas Hedges and Buddy Duress, and he comes up to Alina at a desolate Papaya Dog with an offer to vend her hot tykes and weed when really they ’re both interested in company. He’s an unthreatening teen as hopeless for direction as she is, but Alina is so voided and artless that you smell she’d go with him indeed if it sounded unsafe. They wander the thoroughfares talking about bad parents and black- hole futures, and at some point we realize it’s downtime.
The timeline begins to drop piecemeal like one of Dali’s timepieces. What season was it when Maya Hawke (seamlessly blending into the lower familiar cast) went to that Let’s Eat Grandma musicale? Was Alina there to be dazed by songster- tunesmith Annabel Hoffman, or is that commodity she only saw through the eyes of one of her characters? Are we back in the New York of “ Kiddies,” or is this movie too warm, too probative, too “ Nick and Norah’s Horizon less Playlist” for that? It’s easy enough to understand that the interview scenes where Leon’s youthful cast bandy their expedients and dreams straight into the camera are ever fantastic — fancies from inside Alina’s creative process. But they unmask over into the rest of the film in ways that feel designedly hard to track in this independent movie.
“ Italian Studies” isn’t a mystification to be answered nor a slipstream that resists interpretation at every turn, though Leon’s catch-as- catch-can approach requires a certain quantum of confusion in order to let your logical brain off the hook. However, this one instructs observers to let go and make their own connections, If an independent movie educate you how to watch them. Occasionally, especially in the alternate half when the collective need between Alina and Simon comes to an unanticipated pustule, you can feel Leon tone-sabotaging his new film in an trouble not to fall back on old habits; you can feel him making “Italian Studies” further opaque than it needs to be so that he does n’t get detracted by the same kind of unstable love he formerly knows so well.
This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of verity to hold onto right when the runs of stardom are hanging to pull her out to ocean. Those dockets do n’t always serve each other well or meaningfully coincide with the tone- discovery that Leon’s teenage cast is on the cusp of passing themselves. Despite the mesmeric pleasures of “ Italian Studies,” this 70- nanosecond wisp leaves you with the troubling sense that its means merited more significant ends — that Leon vibes off of Hong Sang-soo, early Wong Kar-wai, and Milos Forman’s “ Taking Off” (among other influences cited in the press notes) without ever relatively arriving at his own thing.
For a youthful independent movie maker who’s no way had trouble expressing a voice of his own, it’s both plausible and frustrating to watch him quietly hear for new chimes in a design born from the occasion to unite with Kirby and reverse- finagled from there. For her part, Kirby is so glamorous and partial- opened as a woman who’s forgotten everything besides her own force of will that no bone will ever second- guess why Leon agreed to work with her before he indeed had an idea of what they would make together.
