In Gimme the Loot and Tramps, writer-director Adam Leon displayed a keen ear for the vernacular of youth and a captivating light touch observing the fluid shifts in his characters from spiky friendship to romantic intimacy. There are plenty of young New Yorkers on hand again in his third feature, Italian Studies, but precious little engagement as they drone on about their fears, frustrations and yearnings. At the center of this supposed reflection on dislocation and connection is Vanessa Kirby, playing a British writer with temporary amnesia in a display of actressy self-indulgence whose charms are far exceeded by its brief 81-minute run time.
Saved to a slim extent by cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz’s dreamy visuals of New York City in the pre-COVID summertime and by dependably mood-enhancing composer Nicholas Britell’s shimmering score, the film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert. More than anything it recalls one of those “lost weekend” stories about Hollywood celebrities that used to be fodder for late-night comedians in times less sensitive to mental illness.
Italian Studies
The Bottom Line No, grazie.
The spark for the project was the ascending star’s availability and desire to work with Leon. While they were tossing around concepts, Kirby reportedly told the director, “I want you to throw me out into the streets of New York and to challenge me.” Apparently, making it interesting for the rest of us wasn’t a concern.
We first meet the character eventually identified as author Alina Reynolds (Kirby) sitting in on a recording session on which her music producer husband (David Ajala) is working in London. A young American woman recognizes her outside the studio and says they met in New York, but Alina has no memory of their encounter or of the events the stranger describes. The only spark that registers is that it might have been the time she lost her dog.
Without any further establishing scenes to shape her character, the film then trips back to summer in New York, as Alina drifts into a haze while shopping in a hardware store and then wanders off with no bag or ID, leaving her dog tied up outside. The echoing muddle of dialogue in her head seems to emanate from the bunch of hipster teens she falls in with over the next couple days, their youthful experiences coloring her attempts to invent a persona for herself to fill the sudden void.
The link to this group of friends is Simon (Simon Brickner), whom she meets trying to resell hot dogs in Chelsea Papaya. “I think I’m a vegetarian,” she says, a hint of clarity appearing to penetrate her fugue state. Simon is a high school senior and an annoying nerd, but he gives her a helpful distinction to categorize the people she meets, between “warm world” and “cold world.” He also locks lips with her in a jarring moment that gets a pass because Kirby is in free-floating wannabe Gena Rowlands mode, untethered from reality, but would be queasy if the genders were reversed.
A clue in Alina’s search to reclaim herself comes from another young stranger who recognizes her from a book event, where she read from the collection of short stories that gives the film its title. She tracks down a copy in the library and starts freely associating characters from her fiction with the kids in Simon’s orbit, whose tedious musings on family, addiction, love and other challenges to be embraced or overcome are stirred into a wraparound soundscape with the ambient noise of the city and Britell’s music. One of the cryptic characters who straddle Alina’s prose and her confused reality is a singer named Lucinda (Annabel Hoffman).
Leon acknowledges Alice in Wonderland as a key influence here, along with certain films by Milos Forman, Olivier Assayas, Wong Kar Wai and Hong Sangsoo, and music videos by Gus Van Sant. If that makes Italian Studies sound like a shapeless hodgepodge of pretentious affectation, that’s exactly what it is. There’s ample atmosphere in the warm tones and singing colors of Jutkiewicz’s cinematography, but very little substance in the mood piece that goes with it.
Working from what appears to be a semi-improvised script, Leon flirts with some potentially stimulating ideas about the ways in which self-perception is molded by environment, and how forgetting can enable a complete rewiring of one’s brain. But even when Alina starts imagining herself as one of her prose characters (played by Maya Hawke), there’s no real sense of the film moving toward tangible realizations. The looseness that worked so well in Leon’s earlier films here just feels slack and empty. The best thing I can say about it is — spoiler alert! — she gets her dog back.
All this also limits what Kirby — looking like she’s strolled onto the set directly from the Pieces of a Woman shoot — can do when the character remains so amorphous and unknowable. For much of the movie she’s making herself up as she goes along and feeding off the young people she meets, but not in any way that ever makes us feel much for either her or them. A coda back in London raises the possibility that the immediacy and openness of Simon and his friends may have seeped into her reawakened consciousness. But it’s hard to care when she still seems less like a fleshed-out character than a tiresome vanity exercise.
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