Tribeca Festival 2021: In Italian Studies, Vanessa Kirby wanders round New York to pick up the pieces of a woman

New York City isn’t confined by the pandemic, geography or space-time in Adam Leon’s Italian Studies. Instead, it becomes a state of mind mirroring the subconscious of its adrift protagonist. Vanessa Kirby plays a woman who slips into a fugue state, and trawls the streets of the city for clues to piece together her identity. In some ways, Italian Studies thus feels like a B-side to Pieces of a Woman, or an extended featurette in its Blu-ray. Leon’s film doesn’t begin in New York but London, where Kirby’s character sits in on a Let’s Eat Grandma recording session at her husband’s studio. While taking a smoke break, she meets a young American woman (Annabel Hoffman), who claims to have met her in New York. She has no recollection of the meeting however, save for the fact she may have lost her dog at the time. What follows is an attempt at reconstructing the events surrounding said meeting. The scene cuts to New York where her amnesia kicks in while shopping at a hardware store. In a daze, she leaves the store, forgetting the pet dog she had tied up outside. Leon lets us accompany her on a stroll across the streets of New York. Along the way, she encounters teenagers with messy stories of their own. Their conversations, Nicholas Britell’s hazy synths, and the noise of the city all bleed into each other, echoing her clouded mind. Frequent timeline shifts and costume changes add to the disorientation. In these blended abstractions emerge clusters of her own identity. One of the teens identifies her as Alina Reynolds, the author of the short story collection that gives the film its title. But a name alone isn’t enough to reclaim one’s identity. Alina must remember the people, the connections, and the environment that also shape it. She colours her tabula rasa anew using inputs from the stories recounted by the teens and those she wrote herself. Talking heads of these teens being grilled on parents, falling in love, and adulting are intertwined into her encounters with them across New York. Befriending the winsome Simon (Simon Brickner) at a hot dog store gives her the first clue to her identity, that she may be a vegetarian. He also helps her recalibrate how she perceives potential encounters, classifying people as “warm worlds” and “cold worlds." At another point, she becomes mesmerised by the voice of a solo singer at a gig. We also learn Alina doesn’t take criticism well, asking a teen — who questions the lack of originality in her story — to “go fuck herself.” Kirby does the best with what little she is given, sustaining an enigmatic aura throughout. Her face switches between transparency and opacity as required, enhancing the film’s atmosphere. Even in moments where she seems utterly lost, it suggests a strength that belies the sense of dislocation she is feeling.   Alina’s memories aren’t entirely lost so much as rendered temporarily inaccessible. It plays into a traveller’s sense of a city, which is always transitory. As strangers and seasons mix and match from one scene to the next, the film resembles the brewing of the primordial soup, a creative pool of stories and ideas yet to be made coherent. Perhaps, these events are a lyrical manifestation of her writing process. She is wiping the slate clean for an upcoming novel or set of short stories about teens, as she wanders around New York looking for kernels of inspiration that have nestled themselves in her mind but yet to take a clear form. It also reflects the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the film itself being the fruit of their collective talent.   There is no clearly-defined narrative in Italian Studies, what with its logic being that of an amnesiac’s subconscious. Its trance-like moments, in and of themselves, can’t be easily reconciled with reality. Put together, they do offer some coherence. In his freewheeling efforts, Leon gives form to Alina’s fragmented mind by turning New York into a strange realm where there is a continued osmosis between fact and fiction. In one of the more powerful moments, Alina rediscovers her own stories in the library. She briefly imagines herself as Erin (Maya Hawke), a characters from her stories. This becomes emblematic of the film’s tone. The gimmickry of its amnesia conceit excused, the keen-to-impress visual pageantry does make for an impressive if indulgent exercise in dislocation. DoP Brett Jutkiewicz’s spectral collage of images are adeptly held together by Britell’s moody score. With an unmoored protagonist in an ill-defined narrative however, the cumulative effect of Alina’s encounters with the teenagers is about as fun as crashing a bunch of parties no one invited you to. Leon makes the borders of truth and fiction porous as a stylistic choice, rather than as a starting point to a cross-disciplinary dialogue. Italian Studies is ultimately a failed experiment that resembles an ouroboros, in that it ends up devouring itself into a void of nothingness.   Italian Studies had its world premiere at Tribeca Festival 2021. It was part of the festival’s Spotlight Narrative section.