![]() For her part, Kirby is so magnetic and half-opened as a woman who’s forgotten everything besides her own force of will that no one will ever second-guess why Leon agreed to work with her before he even had an idea of what they would make together.Amnesiac (released in the United Kingdom as Unconscious) is a 2014 American mystery film directed by Michael Polish and written by Mike Le and Amy Kolquist. Despite the mesmeric pleasures of “Italian Studies,” this 70-minute wisp leaves you with the nagging sense that its means deserved more significant ends - that Leon vibes off of Hong Sang-soo, early Wong Kar-wai, and Milos Forman’s “Taking Off” (among other influences cited in the press notes) without ever quite arriving at his own thing.įor a young filmmaker who’s never had trouble expressing a voice of his own, it’s both admirable and frustrating to watch him silently listen for new harmonies in a project born from the opportunity to collaborate with Kirby and reverse-engineered from there. Those agendas don’t always serve each other well or meaningfully dovetail with the self-discovery that Leon’s teenage cast is on the cusp of experiencing themselves. This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of truth to hold onto right when the tides of stardom are threatening to pull her out to sea. Sometimes, especially in the second half when the mutual need between Alina and Simon comes to an unexpected boil, you can feel Leon self-sabotaging his new film in an effort not to fall back on old habits you can feel him making “Italian Studies” more opaque than it needs to be so that he doesn’t get distracted by the same kind of unbalanced romance he already knows so well. If movies teach you how to watch them, this one instructs viewers to let go and make their own connections. “Italian Studies” isn’t a puzzle to be solved nor a slipstream that resists interpretation at every turn, though Leon’s catch-as-catch-can approach requires a certain amount of confusion in order to let your logical brain off the hook. But they spill over into the rest of the film in ways that seem deliberately hard to track. What season was it when Maya Hawke (seamlessly blending into the less familiar cast) went to that Let’s Eat Grandma concert? Was Alina there to be dazzled by singer-songwriter Annabel Hoffman, or is that something she only saw through the eyes of one of her characters? Are we back in the New York of “Kids,” or is this movie too warm, too supportive, too “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” for that? It’s easy enough to understand that the interview scenes where Leon’s young cast discuss their hopes and dreams straight into the camera are somehow unreal - visions from inside Alina’s creative process. The timeline begins to drip apart like one of Dali’s clocks. They wander the streets talking about bad parents and black-hole futures, and at some point we realize it’s winter. He’s an unthreatening teen as desperate for direction as she is, but Alina is so emptied and guileless that you sense she would go with him even if it seemed unsafe. He’s something of a toothy cross between Lucas Hedges and Buddy Duress, and he comes up to Alina at a desolate Papaya Dog with an offer to sell her hot dogs and weed when really they’re both interested in company. His name is Simon (Simon Brickner, a major find whom Leon met when directing a live show called “The All-City Hour Variety Hour”). But the most important person she meets only knows her as another lost soul. ![]() Regardless, the film’s teenage cast is so believable that everyone around them feeds off their verisimilitude we might even forget that Kirby is famous if not for the fact that Alina has a fanbase of her own. The disquieting mix of fame and uncertainty suggests a less carnivorous version of Scarlett Johansson’s character in “Under the Skin,” though it’s unclear if some of the people Alina encounters are “real,” or if everyone is just made to seem that way. Her mind is etch-a-sketched blank, much to the chagrin of the little dog she leaves tied up on the street outside.įrom there, the film surveils Kirby (with the help of Brett Jutkiewicz’s long lenses, hordes of oblivious extras, and a seemingly generative ambient score from the brilliant Nicholas Britell) as she wanders the city like a blinkered alien who’s never been there before. We see Alina walk into a Chelsea hardware store one afternoon, and then… well, that’s really all there is to it. That question is left unanswered (this is not a movie where someone’s memory loss is explained by a trip to the ER and some curious MRIs), but “Italian Studies” dekes back in time to show us when the amnesia started. ![]()
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