The memory loss or “spontaneous amnesia” genre is nothing new in cinema. It arguably began in 1915, with The Garden of Lies and The Right of Way, the former about a husband who enlists the services of a doctor to help him recover the memory of his new bride, the latter about amnesia stemming from an assault. As the decades wore on in cinema, amnesia or “unexplained memory loss”—sometimes merely a coping mechanism for functioning/getting through a traumatic situation (like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard)—became almost like a crutch for ensuring an “unquestionable” plot device.
While some films use the device for comedy (e.g. Desperately Seeking Susan and 50 First Dates), others wield it for bittersweet drama (e.g. Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Italian Studies falls somewhere slightly in between, veering more obviously toward bittersweet drama. Though there are humorous moments peppered in, including our heroine, Alina Reynolds (Vanessa Kirby), being repeatedly asked by a pair of Hasidic Jews if she’s Jewish, to which she honestly replies, “I don’t know.” Though her shiksa aesthetic makes the answer pretty obvious.
Writer-director Adam Leon, perhaps wary of the effortless praise of his first two films, Gimme the Loot and Tramps, has taken a great creative risk with his amnesia study in Italian Studies. Like the Safdie brothers, it’s evident he’s in his element in New York, the town in which he was born. And maybe, being part of that rare breed, he’s acknowledging something that the transplants—those with rosier-tinged glasses about the place—can’t always see: New York is a trauma epicenter. And Manhattan a cursed island with the residual haunted energy of the Lenape tribe that was so rudely walled out of the area they preferred to call Manahatta. Perhaps the lingering karmic consequences of that slight are tacitly at play in Italian Studies, as Alina wanders the streets in a vague daze among the crazed energy, not wanting to admit to those she encounters that she has no idea who she really is or how she got there. Yet even the various random people Leon focuses in on during the initial scenes of the film seem to be lost in a trance. Roaming the streets as though not totally sure why they’re there, in New York. Maybe simply only in said milieu because it was where they were told for so long that it was “the place to be” without really questioning it.
Alina is doing her best not to either—one minute leashing up her dog in front of a hardware store, and the next not totally certain why she’s in an aisle staring at wing nuts. It’s largely tantamount to what the “structure” would be of documenting someone in a classic drunken blackout, as only NYC can spur. But Alina isn’t drunk, and there’s never any explanation as to why she took momentary leave of her senses during this episode of “forgetfulness.” The point is that it’s New York itself that appears to be the catalyst. For she’s perfectly fine back in London, where she’s spotted by one of the teenagers, now at university, who hung out with her at the party Simon (Simon Brickner) brought her to. Naturally, she has no memory of Simon, but apparently the two were quite close—from what she’s told anyway (and from what we as the viewer get to see).
The structure of Italian Studies, or lack thereof, is a deliberate mirror of how disjointed and disconnected remembrances can be. Snatches of a moment that never fully add up to a larger picture. As we see her first slip out of awareness, dialogue plays over her frantic state. A line that we’ll recognize later when it shows up at the party: “Do you forget all your works after you write them?” Indeed, Alina is a writer. Fittingly, of short stories, which don’t require as much time commitment to one narrative, or cohesiveness when strung together into a collection (for even if there is an overarching “theme,” none of the stories have to be related). Incidentally, many writers do forget what they’ve written once it’s “out of them.” As though the invisible hand of the muse caused them to enter a fugue state while they were doing it.
Alina does not remember being in her own fugue state in New York, though she is aware that it was all tied to losing her dog. For when Annika (Annika Wahlsten), the girl who sees her in London, asks if she Alina recalls meeting her, she replies, eventually, “Was this when I lost my dog?” Granted, she doesn’t “lose” her pet, so much as has an amnesiac blackout in the hardware store, walks out and ignores the dog’s presence altogether. Because, in her current state of mind, she has no memory of owning a dog.
Whilst in the store, however, she can hear the words she wrote from her own book, called, naturalmente, Italian Studies. One such sentence includes, “The more Claire listened, the more she realized it didn’t matter. She simply did not speak the language.” This could be interpreted, based on context, in a couple ways, the first being that her time spent among Simon and his fellow youths is as foreign to her as any previously unvisited country. The second, and the one that suits the purposes of despising New York and all that it does to people is that Alina is using her character’s words to describe how she feels in this rudderless city, where everyone is constantly whirling and swirling—doing everything they can to “get somewhere” while ultimately running in circles. When Simon sees that Alina isn’t like that at all, it’s obvious his attraction to her is more than just platonic.
As she ingratiates herself into Simon’s group, she appears to literally become one of them at a certain point, with Maya Hawke’s character, Erin, tellingly wearing the same outfit that Alina was before. Another quote from Alina’s book comes while at an open mic night via the narration, “She was struck into a state by one of the performers. A singer named Lucinda.” Note the term “struck into a state”—something that many like to bill as a “positive” aspect of what New York can do to you. This Lizzy Grant-type Alina refers to is in the midst of performing her slow, languid number that changes “Gowanus Canal” to “Gowanus River” so she can rhyme it with “trigger.” And there’s a moment before this where Alina suddenly seems to realize she’s been searching for this girl the entire time.
Whether or not this is all just a grand metaphor for the kind of head in the clouds, schizophrenic daze that writers endure as they uncontrollably flit in and out of the worlds they’ve created depends, perhaps, on if you’re a writer or not. Otherwise, it’s an all-too-poetic allegory for the spontaneous state of blackout New York requires in order to survive there. At the end of the film, Annika suggests that Alina ought to reach out to Simon. She replies, “I don’t know… I wanted to thank the girl that helped me [Lucinda] and move on, really. I mean, I think you can have something special and brief, and you don’t have to chase it. It remains what it was. And…it’ll always be there, the effect of it, in some way… If that makes any sense.” Oh yes, to anyone who has ever lived in New York during a period of their lives, left it and tried to come back—it makes an especial sense, to boot. Annika, still too young and naïve to get it, responds, “I mean, not really, honestly.” Here, Kevin Spacey ought to pop out to say, “You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, you will someday.”
The final frame of Italian Studies reveals Simon smiling—beaming from somewhere deep in the recesses of Alina’s mind, which has chosen to suppress all that “New York business.” He remains the representative distant glimmer of that first moment one arrives in New York, and it’s all so full of promise and excitement before the inevitable need to blot out, by any means necessary, all the trauma that will ensue.
