«Nineteen», on the edges of life and the desire for a revolt

"In my passion for ancient books I have always been tied to autobiography. I was a fanatic of Leopardi, among my favorite books was the autobiography of Vittorio Alfieri, Benvenuto Cellini. Compared to established literature, they have always given me something more". This is how Giovanni Tortorici told his story from Venice on these pages, speaking about his debut, Diciannove, which was the revelation film at the last Film Festival (it was in the Orizzonti section), immediately projecting its author among the talents to bet on in the near future. Born in Palermo, twenty-eight years old, with a diploma from Holden and a self-taught education, he began working with Luca Guadagnino, who is the producer of the film, on the series We Are Who We Are, some of whose atmospheres can be found here, especially that feeling of the passage of oneself towards an elsewhere still unexplored and unknown.

Nineteen , which are the years of the protagonist, Leonardo – brought to life by the very talented newcomer Manfredi Marini – is the time when choices must be made, school is over, there is the dilemma of what to do next, of discovering what you want, which way to go. It can happen that desires fade, that the planned plans turn out to be wrong, that nothing is exciting, or maybe yes but not where we expected it, that anger and indifference win, that the contours of the world despite some granite certainties are increasingly uncertain.

I was a Leopardi fanatic, among my favorite books there was Alfieri's autobiography. Compared to the set literature, I have always been more interested in Giovanni Tortorici

Leonardo wakes up anxious and bleeding from his nose: he has to leave, he travels from Palermo to London where his sister lives, he is enrolled in economics but he already knows that it is not the right thing for him. He moves to Siena, to Literature, he loves refined writing between the fourteenth century and the Baroque. A solitary out-of-towner, who hates his roommates, he fantasizes about a fluid desire, affirms a silent rebellion, made of gestures that escape most, and visions that slip into possible existences.

IT IS A COMING of age Nineteen but not only, just as it is not the autobiography of its author despite the many declared correspondences - for one, the character's apartment in Siena is where he lived - that punctuate the protagonist's movement. Leonardo is a boy out of (his) time, like Tortorici he loves the poets of the fourteenth century, Piero Giordani, the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli, books and writers that are not found in anthologies and that are very rarely attended in university courses. He studies, reads, buys many rare texts online - spending all the money his parents give him. The world seems repulsive to him, he takes refuge in a kind of superiority (which is perhaps only fragile) so much so that he challenges a professor on the interpretations of Dante during the exam. Yet this way of being - in comparison with adults as well as with his peers always jarring - which is then a clash with reality never becomes rhetoric of the past or nostalgia for its own sake. Rather, it composes an intimacy that is in its own way generational, and which, without ever generalizing or relying on the clichés of "gender", is an experience of what has been known.

THE DIRECTOR never moves away from the gaze of his character, which is slow and objective, and shapes or deforms the perception of what we see according to his emotional state, in the ghosts of an unspeakable buried somewhere, in the disorientation of an obsession without holds, which appears crazy or absurd, which seeks epiphanies of the unknown. With an elegant, always cinematic writing, that is, which lives in the matter and between the grain of its images, he composes his narration. Is it him? Isn't he? It doesn't matter, life becomes something else in the distance of the story, in a staging that is an artistic gesture, which plays, displaces, mixes pain and irony, enters the depths of being without pleasing, indeed shamelessly loves to sow disquiet. This figure who in the ancient canon brings something punk, is eccentric and embodies in his presence, in that beautiful and bent physicality, the less visible emotions. Disturbing and never conformist, this character crosses the frame to take us towards unknown paths, that surprise any expectation, that ask us to put ourselves in play with our looks. Tortorici takes the risk of a balance that he could easily lose, and that instead he controls with soft security, in the love for images that fills with life and truth, in a filmmaking that is a gesture of discovery.