by Jason Adams
About a year after I first moved to New York a friend pulled me aside at a party to tell me two secrets about a mutual acquaintance of ours. The first secret was that this mutual was secretly fabulously wealthy, which one never would have guessed from the way she presented herself -- after twenty years of living in NYC I've come across this type often enough that it doesn't seem novel anymore, but it surprised me then. But it was the second secret that has really stuck with me all these years -- this friend would occasionally take a week off from her life, check into a high-scale hotel uptown, and pretend to be a different person. She told stories of romances and adventures in disguise -- a dalliance outside of one's daily existence; a vacation from one's literal self.
The second secret obviously couldn't exist without the first one -- only a rich person would be able to do such a thing -- but it struck me then and now as the most genuine benefit of wealth I'd ever heard. Rolexes are pretty, but the ability to actually escape, to slough off your worries and cares and just live somebody else's life for a collection of minute sounds priceless. I thought of those secrets watching Adam Leon's meditative new film Italian Studies at Tribeca this week, which stars the ever-riveting Vanessa Kirby... ...as a successful writer who walks into a hardware store one afternoon and suddenly, as she's looking at some paint brushes, loses her memory.
The rest of the film follows Alina (Kirby) as she wanders New York -- for what is probably just twenty-four hours but at times feels like it could be weeks -- and meets people, adopting slivers of identity in the process. A teenage boy tries to sell her some hot dogs (not a euphemism) and she decides on the spot she's actually a vegetarian; stuff like that. The most important interaction comes when a young woman thinks she recognize Alina as the author of her favorite book of short stories (which is titled Italian Studies) and so Alina quickly heads to the library and tries to learn about herself from the stories she may or may not have written; every conversation she has from there on out sticks to that script. This is who i am, author of this book, eight stories, one about teenagers.
As Alina reads her book we suddenly see actress Maya Hawke wearing the same outfit as Kirby and acting out some of the interactions we've seen Kirby engage in, a deeper slippage of self into a fiction inside a fiction; the story in the book becomes a part of the story Alina is living, telling herself -- did I mention this whole bout of amnesia has a framing device where we have seen Alina some time later remembering back on this strange chapter in her life? Is she actually remembering, or is she writing a story? Interspersed with our tale are interviews with the people Alina meets on her journey; is this research for a story, or part of her actual experience?
Writer-director Leon, along with an instinctually slippery Kirby, dissolve memory and selfhood into a fantasia of almosts -- every time things seem nearly clear the gorgeously filmed skyline slithers into a sea of reds and blacks and yellows and escapes our grasp. (The cinematography from Brett Jutkiewicz and the music from noted genius Nicholas Britell are totally worth the price of admission alone.) Like Lucrecia Martel's similarly themed and pointedly hazy The Headless Woman some might find the ride frustrating -- Italian Studies is far more interested in questions than it is answers. But if you're willing to go along for the ride I found it a hypnotic consideration of who we are and how we got to be that, and how easy it would be to just walk down a different street one day and be somebody else, even if only for a flash.