Film Review: ITALIAN STUDIES: New York Stories in the Most Ephemeral Sense [Tribeca 2021]

Italian Studies Review

Italian Studies (2021) Film Review from the 20th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Adam Leon, starring Vanessa Kirby, Simon Brickner, David Ajala, Misha Brooks, Fred Hechinger, and Maya Hawke.

Who are we but a mix of our histories, our experiences, and the stories we hear and tell? The older we get the more we gather all those things … and the harder it may become to distinguish one from another. Italian Studies, the new film from writer-director Adam Leon, is a lucid investigation into such schisms of identity, and the struggle to determine where projection usurps authenticity.

Alina Reynolds (Vanessa Kirby) is a thirty-something writer living in London. During an outing with her husband (David Ajala) and friends, she crosses paths with a stranger while in search of a cigarette. This young woman tells Alina they’ve met before, in New York City, although for the life of her Alina can’t recall this encounter.

From there, the narrative goes reeling back across oceans and time to the Big Apple, where Alina was once living an earlier life. During this time Alina is constantly distracted and moves about the city in a trance. She’s not really sure why she’s where she is at any given moment (even abandoning her dog at a hardware store while in such a haze), much less who she is. Through chance encounters and pure coincidence, she eventually pieces together her identity through her own writings, and begins to vaguely work out her next steps. She then falls into the stoned graces of teenager Simon (Simon Brickner) and his easy-going group of friends, who allow her to tag along in their cross-town adventures – as “research” for an upcoming novel – with little judgment and reckless abandon.

But … is she really doing that? Locations and moments begin to overlap, with Alina changing her outfit or even her whole being (via a younger Maya Hawke stand-in) in the blink of an eye, without breaking dialogue. And the more she learns about her body of work – particularly a collection of short stories titled “Italian Studies” – the more the adventures she finds herself in seem to parallel those she’s already written about. It’s made even more difficult to suss out what is and isn’t real when she freely admits to forgetting every story she’s ever written. One wonders whether Alina is truly suffering some sort of memory loss or if she’s just reliving her own stories vicariously, which creates nothing but a dreamy, convoluted reality.

Despite never resolving the mystery of the film’s structure, Leon makes it effortlessly watchable with a silky-smooth progression. The logic in which Alina bounces around New York from place to place and month to month is never rationalized, but with the inviting way in which Leon strings it along – with stable handheld cinematography, a team of four editors, and a wondrous score from Nicholas Britell – the core mystery is rendered mostly irrelevant (or at least the solving of it is). Alina, who Kirby plays with a disaffected curiosity, floats through her scenes with fearful and fearless naivety, making her an untethered anchor for us within an equally unstable world.

Still, as beautiful and entrancing as Italian Studies can be, those same qualities make it all the easier to disconnect ourselves from it. It’s like a commentary without the commentary, a statement without the purpose. Think Kids, san the shock value and the social bite.

It’s not horrifying nor thrilling but it is an anxiety-induced drama ­– like a stress dream, where the nightmare is reliving your most frustrating moments, like failing a test or losing your keys for missing an appointment. As a defense mechanism (especially amongst those of us who’ve spent too much of our adult lives living with anxiety-induced insomnia), we’re just going to tune out.

But within those stressed-induced nightmares are kernels of truth … perhaps even ones that we adults choose to actively avoid.

As Italian Studies goes on we see how Alina becomes more and more unappreciative of the teenagers, taking advantage of their generosity and openness all for the sake of her “research”. By doing so she participates in a sort of generational (and to some degree, cultural) voyeurism that consumes all the fun-loving, risk-taking, devil-may-care attitude of being a teenager in New York City, but with none of the responsibility that comes attached to those lives on their own – nor to herself as an adult among them. Italian Studies may function as a love letter to the grittiness and vitality of both adolescence and metropolitan life, but it’s also a scoffing rebuke at those who’d only seek vicarious depictions of it through media rather than earnestly interrogate the sources that perpetuate such grit (mainly, inequality and isolation) in the modern age. Escapism through literature is a fine pastime, but it’s also not a way of life.

Italian Studies is a New York film in the most ephemeral sense. Everyone stands out in the city and simultaneously blends into it. Everything is bursting with life, but it’s insignificant all the same.

Such are the narratives we use to find slivers of relatability while we try to make heads or tails of the chaos of the rest of it.

Rating: 6/10

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