It's expected that first-time filmmakers will reveal their stylistic influences from the start, but rarely are they spelled out as clearly as in Nina di Majo's Autumn, which suggests that the 24-year-old writer-director has spent much of her life watching Woody Allen's Hannah And Her Sisters on a continuous loop. Set among the well-heeled Neapolitan haute bourgeoisie, Autumn is a collection of seriocomic episodes separated by white-on-black title cards and paced by a breezy jazz score. In a film populated by high-strung, opinionated intellectuals, none is more wired than the character played by the director herself, a would-be novelist with enough neurotic hang-ups to rival any of Allen's self-caricatures. Assured and elegantly made, if not especially compelling or pointed, Autumn follows the fractured lives of three generations of wealthy but alienated people. Of the trio, di Majo is by far the most interesting, a twentysomething university student who indulges her passion for writing at the expense of her studies and human relationships. The director's brother, Pietro Alessio di Majo (one of three family members she cast in the film), plays a teenager living in a cavernous home, so frightened off by the world that he's given to burrowing under the furniture. Elisabetta Piccolomini is the third major character, a middle-aged matron who flees her loveless marriage but cannot escape her husband's insidious influence. Autumn is intended to be a harsh critique of bourgeois values at the end of the century, but it barely registers as such; when di Majo labels her characters as too self-involved to carry on healthy human relationships, she's merely being cruel. Promising as it is at times, the film labors under the shadow of Allen's influence—and by extension, that of her Italian contemporary Nanni Moretti—and is never quite funny or perceptive enough to stake its own claim. Autumn is the work of a precocious new talent, but it hasn't fully matured.