“Italian Studies”The most common, yet disorienting, of social embarrassments begins with a minor, familiar but still embarrassing one: You run into someone you know, but can’t remember their name. For most of us, it’s a simple slip of the memory. For London-based writer Alina, confronted with a blank space in her brain after bumming a cigarette off an apparent stranger, it’s a callback to a longer, more damaging period of dissociation — when, while living in Manhattan, she suddenly forgot who she was for several days. Adam Leon’s minor-key, jaggedly structured indie isn’t concerned with the specific whens, hows and whys of Alina’s out-of-nowhere amnesia, but with the hazy in-the-moment sensation of being struck with it, the sensation of stumbling for the lightswitch in your own mind. That’s a nebulous-sounding dramatic proposition, though as performed by a nervy, live-wire Vanessa Kirby, it becomes a tensely compelling one.
Arriving a year after Kirby’s Oscar-nominated breakout in the emotionally ravaging “Pieces of a Woman,”The quieter, more unusual “Italian Studies” could as easily have taken that film’s title. For the bulk of its slender 79-minute running time, Alina is gathering her own personal fragments — an interior missing-person investigation far less systematic than the tattoos-and-Post-Its pursuit of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento,”But it also has its own urgent sense of investigative urgency. It’s a mystery that Leon, regaining the form of his festival-lauded debut “Gimme the Loot”The less memorable “Tramps,”He is happy to leave the mystery unsolved, as his film alternates between timelines or states of consciousness. There’s a longer, meatier psychodrama to be made from the same teasing premise, but it might not have this one’s glimmery poetry.
Leon and Kirby portray the moment everything falls apart from Alina with an eerily banal plausibility. She walks into a hardware shop in New York one bright afternoon. She ties her dog outside and browses the aisles idly. In a minute, it seems, she goes from not really knowing what she’s looking for to not really knowing why she’s there at all, along with how she got there and where she’s supposed to go. Kirby’s body language subtly seizes and panics. As if searching for the comfort of a pulse, Kirby’s hand moves to her chest. To give the illusion of being in control, she keeps moving. As she saunters out of the store without collecting her dog, the mutt’s bewildered whine echoes our own gasping concern.
Still, if any place allows you time to stall while you’ve lost yourself, it’s New York City, where if nothing else, you can simply following the rhythm of the street until another plan forms. Shooting in saturated daytime ochres and fluorescent darkness, Leon and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz capture the city’s alluring, enveloping glare and movement with woozy tactility, while Nicholas Britell’s score blends sidewalk noise and clatter into its moody synthetic mass. For a while, every passing distraction from a screaming ambulance to a distant bouquet of fireworks loans Alina a vivid sense of place to counter her missing sense of self. When she lets Simon Brickner (huckstering teenager) talk to her in Chelsea Papaya, she temporarily gains a sense of purpose in the void.
Alina, a writer, has the ability to create characters for herself. She clings to that part of her identity when a passing admirer of the work alerts her. She searches out her books in library and reads with an unfamiliar awe. Posing as herself, in a sense, she infiltrates Simon’s youthful circle, claiming to be researching a novel — whereupon “Italian Studies” (its oblique title taken from Alina’s short story collection) tilts into a realm of suspended, overlapped reality.
It’s unclear whether her confessional conversations with these teens are occurring in real time, dredged from the fog of memory or simply dreamed up in Alina’s fugue state. The mystery surrounding her identity extends and echos across many timelines. She may have been playing with the idea of an interior collapse as she was a serial inventor, of lives and minds, long before her world fell apart. Kirby plays Alina’s sporadic surges of self-recognition with the euphoric, body-quickening air of an artist suddenly striking inspirational gold after a period of going blank. Seductive and frustrating by design, Leon’s film never follows its own leads to the end — but by fashioning amnesia as another kind of writer’s block, it shows us the way.