Italian Studies Review: A Vibrant but Half-Formed Love Letter to New York City

As depicted in writer-director Adam Leon’s Italian Studies, a successful author’s (Vanessa Kirby) haphazard journey through Manhattan after she suddenly loses her memory has little of the urgency often seen in mysteries about recovering one’s identity. What Leon is presenting here is more of a free-associative, impressionistic portrait of a pre-pandemic city awash in noise, crowds, and serendipitous encounters. To the extent that this dreamy and at times tiresome film succeeds at all, it’s due to the crackling energy of the people who Kirby’s Alina Reynolds falls in with over the course of her wanderings.

Alina is barely sketched out before amnesia wipes her mind clean. In a brief opening scene, we see her inside a London music studio where her husband is recording a dream-pop duo (played by Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth of Let’s Eat Grandma). Their music’s woozy reverb provides a romantically lonely cue that the rest of the film, and Nicholas Britell’s score, seems to vibrate around. When a girl at the studio asks Alina about the time they shared in New York with a kid named Simon (Simon Brickner), Alina has no idea what she’s talking about.

In the flashback that dominates the rest of the film, Alina is seen in New York, just another casually yet confidently stylish young woman about town walking her dog. Her amnesia strikes when she steps into a hardware store. The moment itself is handled in immersive rather than melodramatic fashion, as Alina’s break from any memory of her past registers not through jump cuts or zooming close-ups, but a jumbled sound scheme and a suddenly vacant look in her eyes. Drifting out of the store, Alina leaves her dog behind and heads out into the city.

Alina’s wanderings, seemingly shot guerilla-style, have a lovely rhythm that presents the city as a hurly-burly of activity: thronging crowds, howling emergency vehicles, and, in one particularly beautiful shot, fireworks blasting into the night sky. The bustling cityscape seems at first to hypnotize Alina and, then, as night falls, to cause concern mixed with curiosity.

At Chelsea Papaya, Alina stumbles upon Simon, a teenager whose goofiness and outbursts of brash honesty strikes a chord with her. Alina and Simon roam the nighttime streets and she soaks up his nonstop patter. But little of this is presented in linear fashion; instead, Leon jangles the thin strip of story with other narratives whose connection takes time to unweave.

In one narrative strand, we see a crew of fun-loving teens (including a younger-looking Simon) bounding around the city, having a blast and engaging in very serious conversations about life. In another, a slightly different version of the same crew does similar things yet with Alina in the mix. A third strand drops in documentary-style interviews with members of the first crew, answering questions posed about their lives and hopes by an off-camera Alina. After Alina discovers that she’s a writer and finds a collection of her short stories in the library, it’s suggested that she’s immersing herself with these kids—who turn out to be some sort of loosely amalgamated music and theater troupe—as research for a story.

During the course of all this meandering, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured. Leon is an ace when it comes to making a city into a character itself, as he did with his breakout debut feature, Gimme the Loot. But while there was a romantic underlay to that film’s low-stakes story, Italian Studies has even less to engage with. Alina is a tabula rasa on which nothing gets imprinted. Still, Kirby’s performance anchors things quite well, mixing watchfulness and reserve with a kind of specific hunger for engagement. It’s as though Alina’s loss of memory has dropped her fresh into a new world. She wants to know more about it but can only truly connect with these kids, particularly Simon’s effusive energy.

Eventually Alina finds her way back to herself. But the journey seems to have left little impression on her. What Leon is not able to convey in the end is why her night of misadventure should mean anything more to the audience than it ultimately does to her.