Giovanni Tortorici's honest, intelligent youth portrait, produced by Luca Guadagnino and starring Manfredi Marini, cannot escape strict lines and objectives.
Spiny Desync with alternative camera view
No one talks much about turning 19. It doesn’t come with the exhilarating avalanche of adult rights that comes with turning 18, or the milestone symbolism of 21. You’re still technically a teenager, but you don’t feel like one; nevertheless, the looming dawn of your twenties is daunting, as if a chapter in your youth is about to close. It’s a corridor age, in other words, and Leonardo, the oh-so-19-year-old protagonist of Italian writer-director Giovanni Tortorici’s exceptional debut feature “Diciannove,” is feeling the transitional, overlooked, neither-here-nor-there angst.
As Leonardo stumbles through his first year of college, searching for a clear sense of who he’s supposed to be, the safe floor of childhood falls away from beneath him, adulthood teasingly hovering out of reach. Tortorici seems to recall that disorienting feeling of being let out (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve quite found yourself; if you don’t, his funny, jittery, suitably unformed film will send you into quivering flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for both the filmmaker and his intense, erratic young star, Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.
Produced by Luca Guadagnino, for whom Tortorici previously worked as assistant director, “Diciannove” (Italian for “nineteen” and apparently retained as the international title) seems like familiar stuff on paper: another coming-of-age study focusing on a foalish but charismatic teenager with stunted desires, big ideas and much to discover on all fronts. What makes it distinctive, and unusually authentic within its subgenre, is its eschewing of the neatly gripping growth arc that gives such stories their spine. “Diciannove” weaves wildly with Leonardo’s erratic moods and impulses, offering him no dewy life lessons or self-realizations — only the irregular fragments of knowledge and sometimes grim lived experiences that ultimately define a person.
