31/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Carefree, provocative, asyntactic, Giovanni Tortorici’s debut, produced by Luca Guadagnino, speaks the Gen Z language

The Nineteen [+see also:
trailer
film profile] of the title of Giovanni Tortorici’s debut feature - in competition in the Orizzonti section at the 81st Venice Film Festival - indicates the age of the protagonist, Leonardo (Manfredi Marini). From Palermo (we are in 2015), Leonardo joins his sister (Vittoria Planeta) in London, where he should enrol at a university to study business. Described as someone who “even when he’s there, he’s never really there”, Leonardo gets colossally drunk in a club, languishes for days in his sister’s apartment, leaving the gas in the kitchen open and dirty cottons buds scattered around the bathroom, until he decides to go back home. He falls back on the Faculty of Letters at the University of Siena, which is, not by chance, located in the former psychiatric hospital.

In the mediaeval town, Leonardo starts attending lessons on Dante, entering on a collision course with the professor. Carefully avoiding his two roommates in his student flat and the beer-fueled nights with his university classmates who have forcibly included him in their WhatsApp chat, the young protagonist locks himself up in his room to study Pietro Giordani and Giacomo Leopardi, peek at images of Justin Bieber naked on the internet and talk on the phone with his possessive mother (journalist Maria Pia Ferlazzo). Bored and in the mood for adventure, he publishes a post on a social media platform for gay people in which he describes himself as “good-looking young man: mercenary”. A year later, we find him in Turin where he will have a close encounter with a man close to his family.

Carefree, provocative, lopsided and asyntactic, Nineteen speaks the language of Gen Z kids, born after 2000, and is addressed to them. Vaguely autobiographical (the director, born in 1996, also wrote the script), the film refuses to be a generational portrait but on the contrary it polarises on a subject who expresses a discomfort channelled into neurosis. This is a search for identity - also sexual - that could last a lifetime. The photography by Massimiliano Kuveiller and the editing by Marco Costa go along with this folly, disrupting the shots with slow-motion, still images, and zooms to heighten the strange effect. Costa also worked on Queer [+see also:
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Nineteen is an Italy-United Kingdom co-production by Frenesy and Pinball London, in association with MeMo Films, Tenderstories and AG Studios (United States). International sales are handled by Playtime.

(Translated from Italian)