DICIANNOVE (Giovanni Tortorici 2024)

GIOVANNI TORTORICI: DICIANNOVE (2024)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20GT19.jpg
MANFREDI MARINI, CENTER, WITH DANA GIULIANO AND VITTORIA PLANETA IN DICIANNOVE

Becoming Leonardo

Bravo Guadagnino, to have passed the torch to Giovanni Tortorici, born in 1996: to have found somehing good close at home in an assistant director of his great "We Are who We Are" HBO miniseries, which after all is a coming of age story too, like this. Except that was an American boy and girl of fourteen on an American base in Italy, and this is Italy proper, and as the title says, Leonardo (Manfredi Marini, in an engaging debut) is nineteen. (Variety's Guy Lodge describes the actor as "mercurial" and having "the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural."

Leonardo goes through some changes, while the film avoids many of the current conventions of the genre. Bravo also to Tortorici, writer and director for this film produced by Guadagnino, for delivering a traditional genre in a form that is fresh and intelligent, frankly autobiographical, and paradoxically radical in how traditional it is.

Reviews, at least American ones, comment on the use of many techniques, jump cuts, Dutch angles, and so forth, the multiiple approches to point of view. All the time there is the "formal invention," a playful use of devices, fast zooms, odd angles, slo-mo, animation, expressionistic ways to clue us in on Leonardo's POV and express a state of continual self-invention and self-discovery.

More importantly, though, this is a European, not an American, coming of age film that concerns European experience, and the European mind. There is no joking about sex and little in the way of actual sex. There is a hint of a hardon on a train where the only other psssenger in view is a large old man, whatever that means. There is a hint that Leonardo is masterbating on a moment from Pasolini's Salò. Natural enough to be turned on by perversity when it involves a young woman's perfect ass and perfect breasts. There is also a 15-year-old liceo boy with a garland of coevals of both sexes, and a brilliant smile, that Lele (a nickname he's grown tired of) flashes on over and over and tries to find on the internet. He too knows how to smile. But mostly Leonardo is trying to find out who he is and what he wants to study, who he wants to be. Perhaps he is gay, but more surely he is flirting with conservtism.

As the film begins Leonardo goes to London from his native Palermo to bunk at the flat of his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta) (and she greets him as "fratelllino," little brother) where he is to enroll in business school--but wait! (And there will be many sudden shifts): before that he will immerse himself in his sister's hard-partying lifestyle for a while, pourihg down the liquor which will come back up before the night is over.

Leonardo has second thoughts and is not at home with either his sister's lifeestyle, London as a milieu, or business as a subject, because before very long he is on the internet looking up (in Italian) "best Italian universities for the study of literature," and he's getting "Siena" and Bang! he's there, enrolled at the university, flat-sharing with a couple of girls, a depressive law student and a fat giggly student of medicine, and preparing to study Italian literature. He eschews the kitchen because they love meat (he's vegetarian) and cooks with a hot plate in his room.

The film is a little bit of a travelogue in giving the name of each city Leonardo goes to, all Italian from now on. Posted on the screen humorously in big old fashioned letters, they are first Palermo, then London, now Siena, later Milano, Torino, and then again at the end, Palermo (where at last for once he apppars to be in a friendly social group, old schoolmates no doubt). We don't know where Leonardo is going next. Often he seems not to know either, and he does get buffeted back and forth, starting with his bossy mother (Maria Pia Ferlazzo).

This may seem for a minute like a picaresque novel, but it's more a Bildungsroman. Hence except for relatives, including an important young cousin, the other key figures are elders, and Leonardo devotes zero time to making friends. That ready smile is used more to placate professors or keep attracted girls at a safe distance than to win girlfriends, or any friends. Is he gay? It's not 100% clear. But when he gets access to wi-fi in Siena his first search is for Justin Bieber naked.

Leonardo is, like most young men on their own for the first time, a messy, even dirty boy. One of the film's memorable shots comes when his sister travels from London to Siena for a weekend and looks around his room. We see what she sees: a great mound of expensive, ornate looking books on one side; a bed in the middle; and on the other side a chaos of unwashed clothing and junk.

The books are not incidental: Leonardo seeks to define himself by an eccentric focus on pre-modern Italian literature. Even before he leaves London he is shown with a copy of Lettere familiari by Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, a book originally published before 1836. He's also interested in the seventeenth-century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli, and reads aloud his descriptions of mortifications of the flesh (with illustrations), as well as the nineteenth-century writer Pietro Giordani's Epistolario.

In Siena Leonardo squanders what is from a student point of view a small fortune on the books to go with these special interests, and he reads them intensively on his own initiative. He goes nearly bankrupt, and is down to fifty euros when he calls on his mother for help and tries pimping himself out to men for soldi, the latter not very successfully. Some rather original animations briefly flash by here. On the streeet nearby he keeps seeing the smiling liceo boy, fascinated by him, evidently.

Tortorici shows all those arcane titles without caring if anybody gets them. Guadagnino told him he should make his own film, that trying to please would ruin it, and this is a quality that makes Diciannove unique and good.

With the Dante professor's lectures, Leonardo is bored to death from the first. Considering himself a good judge, he writes derogatory squibs during lectures and finds his own supposed "errors" in his oral exam with him were trumped up (he finds the word he used for "vespers," "vespero," though archaic, means the same as the more standerd "vespro"). He cherishes such quibbles because he insists on being right, even when he isn't, quite. He prepares a diatribe against this professor and has it duplicated to distribute around the university, but then thinks better of it. It emerges that he squabbled with his profs even at the liceo: his father suggests it's he who's the problem. He is hard headed and egocentric. One senses that he is right, though, that Siena's literature studies, supposedly the best in Italy, may be hidebound and sensecent, the great Dante scholars of yesteryear now all gone.

Obviously, Diciannove is serious about its intellectalism, providing onscreen shots of title pages of numerous books Leonardo reads, Gasparo Gozzi's 'Defense of Dante,' for instance, and the literary studies of eighteenth-century Jesuit scholar Saverio Bettinelli, arcane books even for Italians. Leonardo pours over these books. He is highly opinionated and self confident--and prejudiced against anything after the nineteenth century. He declares that Pasolini, for instance, did not write well, and decrees that a famous historian of Italian literature is unworthy of his bookshelf, and in lieu of throwing it out the window, he pees on the book to declare his disapproval. This may about sum up the arrogance (and yes, immaturity) of his attitude.

In the last act following the quick visit from London of his sister (when he hides that he has no friends) Leonardo has significant male encounters. His cousin (Zackari Delmas, lively and intense) summons him to Milano to smoke and say he's sick of studying law and is "feeling more letters, more art" himself now. Another wild club and drinking passage follows whose beautiful edit must have taken a long time to get right. Back in Siena, Leonardo walks the centro storico and views one of its high-up plaques with lines from Dante that says: "But could I see the miserable souls/of Guido, Alessandro, or their brother,/I’d not give up the sight for Fonte Branda." All very specific, all very Italian. As Leonardo sits outside reading Ovid we hear a choir singing a work of the eighteenth-century composer Metestasio to show the exhlatation of this experience. (Sedate pre-ninetenth-century music is used as a background--except when it's hip hop briefly in the foreground--throughout the film.)

Two encounters with older men are grueling, precise evaluations of Leonardo's intellectual development and his moral position. The first is with a professor who orally examines him (in Italy, there are many of these, it appears). It's the same professor whose boring Dante lectures Leonardo has sat through and complained of on the phone. (He also complains of fellow students and roommates. Phone conversations sometimes serve here as staccato journal entries.) Right away the professor asks if he has read his book. Of course he hasn't. Zero! In fact this encounter shows, if we hadn't already guessed, that Leonardo isn't as well informed as he thinks. The second, more profound, encounter is with an important friend of his grandmother who turns out to be very wise and perceptive, and a stern judge of the intellectual position Leonardo has been assuming.

This gentleman is an imposing presence, literally large in all directions, an important collector of modern art (in fact played by well known psychoanalyst Segio Bienvenuto) who grills Leonardo on his choices of subject matter and the intellectual, political, and moral posiition these choices imply. He suggests the conservative, retro literary selections Leonardo has been making are in fact exactly what a contemporary terrorist--were he to be Italian and study literature--would have made. Leonardo's choice of "morals," this gentleman sees as a severe narrowing-down.

All this is relatively terra incognita for Americans, whose college experiences tend to take place in the embrace of a collegial "alma mater" that takes care of all our needs. In the traditional European university town represented here clasically by Siena, scholars are entirely on their own and not only have no cosy dormitory but must find their own curriculum and mentors.

But Leonardo is winging it and this is why this fllm at best is like prime Jean-Luc Godard: fresh, provocative, and unexpected. At its best moments the result is exhilarating, and at the very least, with the appealing young actor and inventive screenplay, it's charming. But Manfredi Marini is never just charming, because he convinces as someone with intellectual ambitions who wants to become a writer and has original ideas, even though he can't always correctly answer the conventional quiz questions of what he thihks are dull, jaded profs. But he is also bull-headed and annoying at times and thinks he knows much more than he really does.

Making all this exciting and cool is a surprise for a movie called "19." And it works for nearly two hours. But there's also fun here, plenty of youth of the golden Italian kind, with lots of specific information neatly packed in. Guy Lodge's Variety review calls this film "vivid" and "humane," and that's just the beginning of the praise he heaps on it--with justification: Guadagnino has introduced us to an exciting new discovery.

Jordan Mintzer's Hollywood Reporter review as well as an interview there with the director also attest to how well received this film was at its Venice premiere, the most admired of the Italian films there.

Diciannove, 107 mins., premiered in Venice's Orizzonti section Aug. 30, 2024 and opened in Italy Feb. 27, 2025. It has also shown in festivals at Toronto, Hamburg, BFI London, Mumbai, the Viennale, Göteborg, and in a number of US festivals, most recently coming June 25, 2025 to Frameline in San Francisco. Released theatrically in the US by Oscilloscope July 25, 2025. Metacritic rating: 80%.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20GT19a.jpg
MANFREDI MARINI IN DICIANNOVE

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20GT19b.jpg
THE FILM MAKES USE OF DUTCH ANGLES: MANFREDI MARINI AGAIN