Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Giovanni Tortorici, Protégé of Luca Guadagnino, on Directorial Debut ‘Diciannove’
Midway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici has emerged as one of the most promising new directors of 2024. The Palermo-born filmmaker, who spent several years learning under renowned Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, premiered his first feature Diciannove on the Lido on Friday. The film is competing in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on spotlighting the work of promising first or second-time filmmakers.
A coming-of-age film that avoids the usual clichés of the genre, Diciannove is a brutally honest depiction of what it feels like to be 19 years old—a blend of disparate desires, intellectual ambitions, and utter loss. The story follows teenager Leonardo Gravina, played by first-time actor Manfredi Marini, as he transitions from business studies in London to a literature degree in Siena. In Siena, he becomes increasingly obsessed with obscure 19th-century Italian authors. Wandering through the medieval Tuscan city’s winding streets and humid apartments, Leonardo embodies the quintessential teenage romantic, filled with youthful promise but corroding from adolescent alienation.
In an admiring review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Jordan Mintzer wrote, “The film’s complete abandonment of plot will turn away viewers looking for some kind of guiding principle or shape to Leonardo’s life, but that’s also what makes Diciannove feel more real than many movies supposedly about being young today. In some ways, Tortorici is carrying on a tradition of Italian art films, including Fellini’s I Vitelloni and Pasolini’s Accattone, about disaffected youth who are part of a lost generation, although Leonardo seems to belong to no other group but his own.”
In an interview, Tortorici discussed how Diciannove resurrects his own tumultuous passage through young adulthood. He explained, “It’s about the experience of being 19 years old. But during his trajectory through the film, the protagonist and his personality don’t develop too much. As the film ends, he’s much the same as he was when it began. So, it’s a little different from other coming-of-age stories. The idea came up from my own experience. I was very curious to explore some things that I had lived through. I wanted to try a form of narration that describes little things on a daily basis—things that are a symptom of a way of being.”
Tortorici chose to shoot on 35mm film rather than digital, which was significant for his visual intentions. “Yes, the movie was shot in 35mm. My director of photography, Massimiliano Kuveiller, and I did a lot of rehearsals and tests with lenses and I was very attached to 35mm. The visual language of the film was something that was very important to me,” he noted. He also revealed a personal influence: “I remember watching Suspiria by Dario Argento, and there is a scene near the beginning with a closeup of a sliding door. From that moment, I felt that I suddenly understood a little about cinematic language. It’s something a little simple, but I felt I understood. So in my film, there are two moments with closeups of sliding doors which are a little homage.”
Throughout the film, hints of body horror pepper the protagonist’s alienation from his own body. Tortorici comments, “Yeah, at that age you can be very alienated from your own body, because of a general neurosis, I think. Because at that age, you have a lot of passions and it’s not easy to understand them, so sometimes you sublimate things, or you connect your passions to unpredictable things.”
He further explained the autobiographical elements in Diciannove: “Oh yes, it’s very much autobiographical. Obviously, it’s impossible to be 100 percent autobiographical, so I mixed in a little fantasy. But in my youth, I loved the literature and the books that he loves. One of the very famous Italian writers I was obsessed with—Giacomo Leopardi—says that when you go with autobiography, you stop the use of rhetoric. So yes, I try to be very faithful to what I experienced.” Notably, the apartment seen in the movie is the exact one Tortorici lived in nine years ago. They shot in the very room he once occupied.
Describing how he feels after putting his past on screen, Tortorici said, “I feel happy. As time goes by, you lose some of your memories. So I think it was good for me to have made this and in a certain way to have stopped time. It makes me very happy to have represented how it was. And not just out of ego. When I was a kid, I would have liked so much to have been able to watch a movie or read a book that represented the personal experience of someone at that age with full sincerity. So I was also trying to do that for other young people who are like I was.”
A compelling closing dialogue with an older, wealthy art collector character adds depth to Leonardo’s character. Tortorici explained this narrative choice: “For the first hour and 30 minutes of the film, you are very close to the character and his neuroses. And at a certain point, I think you need a more mature, psychoanalytical perspective in some way. Maybe I was a little bit scared that after being so close to the character, the audience could have believed that he is right in his views and that he is as smart as he thinks he is. So I felt we needed this scene, but I’m not sure. I need to think about it more myself.”
Discussing his future projects, Tortorici reveals he has written another script. Initially tempted to explore fictional narratives far from his personal experiences, he realized that every story ends up reflecting the storyteller. “So I started thinking about when I was 16 and how different I was from when I was 19. The social environment and the way I was living was completely different. My life at 19 was very intellectually driven, but when I was 16 it was like a Larry Clark kind of story—drugs and girls, and wild adolescence. So I wrote a script with these experiences, and when I showed it to some producers and collaborators, they were amazed by how different it was from Diciannove even though it’s also based on my experiences.”
Laughing, he shared, “Yeah, but in the future I would also like to explore other things. I actually love genre movies, thrillers, even kung fu movies. So we will see.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
