Italian Studies

If you don't remember who you are, then you can't
really be lost. Because then there's nowhere you have
to be
dir: Adam Leon
2022
The fuck was that about…
I can assure you of one thing and one thing only: No Italian is spoken or studied over the course of this frustrating flick. So if you were hoping for some quality Italian talking and such, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
Italian Studies is something of a perplexing flick, and I think deliberately so. It starts with a scene set in I guess London, where a woman meets some people, they go into a studio, some breathy singers sing some dreampop-y songs, and then she bums a ciggie off of a girl.
The girl asks if the older woman remembers her from New York, from hanging out with some other people, including someone called Simon. Who? Who the fuck is Simon?
But then she says “that must be when I lost my dog.”
It then cuts to New York, presumably to the recent past, as a woman walks her dog to a small hardware store, ties her dog up outside, looks around the store for a while, then wanders off without the dog.
She doesn’t remember the dog, but then, she doesn’t remember who she is or where she’s meant to be.
So a lot of this flick is watching this actor, being Vanessa Kirby, walk around New York. If you like Vanessa Kirby, who you may remember from such films as one of them Fast & Furious flicks, or Pieces of a Woman, the harrowing home-birth-gone-wrong Netflix flick, or from when she played the perpetually resentful and envious Princess Margaret in The Crown, then you might enjoy following her around for an hour and twenty minutes.
I think she’s a fine actor, with my favourite thing I’ve seen her in being a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire filmed at the National Theatre that was recorded and on Youtube for a while during the lockdowns. She played Stella to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche DuBois, and they were all great.
This isn’t as great, but it’s okay. I don’t mind watching flicks where people wander around having mini adventures, especially when they’re low-key but jagged, but not life and death, because it reminds me of the past, when I too walked around cities during the day or night.
That was before all that unpleasantness…