You might not assume it, but the handsome, boyish, 19-year-old Leonardo (Manfredi Marini) at the center of Giovanni Tortorici’s refreshingly pulse-tapping debut, Diciannove, doesn’t feel like the world is made for him. His aloofness and soft voice belie a coiled intellect resentful of the modern world thrusting around him. But in the film’s first 20 minutes, during which he travels from his home in Palermo to London, parties with his sister, pukes in a public park, and lazily gears up for his first year of business school, it never rears its head.
Leonardo’s personality is hard to decrypt. A few signs suggest an untapped reserve of disparate passions: a book he brought to London but never read (Anibal Caro’s Lettere Familiari), an offhand compliment to a handsome boy outside a club. While Leonardo is outwardly restrained, almost bashful, that soft voice at all times hovering delicately above his vocal chords, it is Tortorici who does the initial heavy lifting to establish a world of which to be mildly contemptuous. His mother is a nag, his sister, too, critical of his lack of initiative in finding an apartment and skipping orientation week; initial characterizations that reveal flashes of Leonardo’s general distaste for any woman he’s not trying to fuck — that is, if he ever does.
No glittering metropolis, Tororici’s London is instead the grey boredom of an East London apartment complex, a harshly lit off-licence, and the banal but teeth-shattering pulse of a nightclub. There is excitement around, but Leonardo never connects to it. Even his finger-licking flirtations inside the nightclub have a dead-eyed quality to them, thanks to a torrent of handheld, slow-mo camerawork and frenetic editing that flings the viewer’s attention from one noisy far corner of the dancefloor to a make-out session in the center like a drunk fly that can’t stay on the wall. One gets the sense that Leonardo’s life has no capacity to handle the youthful verve of Tortorici’s filmmaking impulses, which flit about one moment and melt between frames the next.
If Leonardo has a worldview, it might profess that “we used to be a real country,” without the hint of irony inherent to most online proclamations of the same. His form of conservatism is culturally literate but smugly contemptuous (a running theme). You wouldn’t be surprised to find him running an X account called something like “Classical Perfection,” that’s just an endless stream of reactionary dogwhistles hidden behind an uncritical and unironic appreciation for all things Classical. Perfection for him is Pre-Renaissance literature and the dead men who wrote, and wrote about, it; garish haircuts and Italian trap music, to him, a regurgitation of an already low form of art, are everything wrong with society. But in Siena, where he impulsively decides to study Italian literature after his jaunt in London, Leonardo finally has a home that confirms his superiority complex, a haven of dutiful brick buildings, quiet solitude, and the intellectual infrastructure that should help him build the life of letters he believes is his calling.
The good times don’t last. He shirks his boring lectures to spend more and more time holed up in his drab rented room, cloistered behind stacks of first editions he can’t afford, acclimated to the smell of rotting fruit he never throws away and the grime-encrusted hot plate next to his bed. His preoccupation with maintaining and deepening his connection to literature turns him into a defensive hermit (he’s insecure enough to lie about his social habits — or lack thereof — saying he went to a party in Rome or a disco just outside of Siena, when asked), but his antisocial relationship to the world means he has no one with whom to discuss his passions. He deems his, admittedly dry, lecturers as beneath him after they lowball his oral examination score, dismiss his antiquated analysis of “Canto II” of Dante’s Purgatorio, and linger pedantically on his usage of outmoded words and phrases. Even a distant cousin with similar passions can’t fulfill his desire, if there actually is one, to share his love of literature. The cousin loves Pasolini, but Leonardo says he prefers writers with stronger morals — later, Leonardo rubs one out while watching Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom on his laptop.
Leonardo has the privilege of his good looks, classical and contemporary at the same time; and a boyish charm that appears to have been trained over the years to get him out of social situations he deems beneath him (a beer and guitar-playing after class) and to ingratiate himself in those that are expedient (online sex work to facilitate his book-buying habit). Sympathy for his troubles is hard to conjure; pity might be a more accurate description of the emotions Leonardo inspires. There’s something sad and endearing about a passion so strong that it defies explanation, and one gets the sense that a deficit of beauty in Leonardo’s life is somehow compensated by his reading. But his love sometimes comes off as pure contrarianism, too, a means of coping with a confusing world he doesn’t actually care to understand. It’s to Marini’s credit that, in his feature film debut, he’s able to balance on this delicate line between introverted sweetness and antisocial resentment without a visible ounce of effort. And it’s all the more revealing of Tortorici’s aims to paint a portrait of youthful conservatism that hides in plain sight.
Tortorici colors Leonardo’s world with divergences. A visit from his sister, a drugged-out, wordless excursion with an unnamed friend, a sexualized fixation on a local high school boy, a trip to Torino to visit his cousin — more dancefloor hookups, a trip to the ER. They might be frustrating narrative drifts in any other film, but represent with great clarity the lurching desire within Leonardo for meaningful connections, an impulse that he dare not admit out loud, lest it reveal how utterly self-imposed his isolation actually is.
Diciannove ends on a note as ambiguous as Leonardo himself. Set a year later on another trip to Torino, we see a bespectacled Leonardo emerge from a cinema with his cousin. Posters on the outside suggest they just saw Paddington 2, Blade Runner 2049, or maybe Geostorm; three radically different permutations of manufactured popular culture someone like Leonardo would detest. The cousin loved whatever they saw. Leonardo’s mind is on a dinner later, hosted by a friend of his grandmother. When he arrives early, he’s treated to a gallery of modern art and mid-century furniture. His host, an older man, identifies Leonardo’s unspoken contempt, teases him for it, and warns of the destructive potential of his radical conservatism by comparing it to ISIS terrorism. “Can fanaticism not lead to excellence?” he asks his host, with as much hope as cynicism. The sly smile plastered on Leonardo’s face as he walks down the street afterwards suggests a changed consciousness as much as a calcified one.
DIRECTOR: Giovanni Tortorici; CAST: Manfredi Marini, Vittoria Planeta, Zackari Delmas, Dana Giuliano; DISTRIBUTOR: Oscilloscope Laboratories; IN THEATERS: July 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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