“Diciannove” (Italian-to-English translation: “Nineteen”) begins with a gushing nosebleed, a blood clot splattering out of Leonardo’s (Manfredi Marini) face on the morning he’s headed to university. Think of this — scuzi — on-the-nose metaphor as one of an adolescent system flushing itself out.
Giovanni Tortorici‘s deliciously directed (freeze frames, animatics, and Dutch angles abound, all in 35mm) and slippery debut premiered in the Orizzonti section devoted to rising filmmakers at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Now, it heads to Toronto, where the playful but deceptively kindhearted “Diciannove” will continue its search for a distributor. (It’ll happen.) The 28-year-old Tortorici, who hails from the city of Palermo in Sicily just like his movie’s lead, worked as an assistant director on Luca Guadagnino’s 2020 young-adult-centered limited series “We Are Who We Are” before the “Call Me By Your Name” director made him his personal assistant. Tortorci showed Guadagnino his script — which follows Leonardo from London on a business school stint that turns out to be a bust to Siena where he discovers his passion for the Italian classics — and Guadagnino soon decided to produce his film. (Guadagnino also produced Dea Kulumbegashvili’s special jury prize winner “April” at Venice.)
“It was the easiest thing ever,” Tortorici told IndieWire during an interview on a hot Venice day at the Hungaria hotel. “He’s super generous, and he’s very interested in young people, and he was telling me that he wanted to do something that at his age didn’t happen to him because he was self-made. He didn’t have a figure that helped him, and so he was like, ‘I want to help young people to obtain what they want to do.’ I showed him the script. He liked it a lot, he wanted to produce it, and he did it.”
Tortorici said he looked at thousands of young, unknown actors before landing on Marini, who now has an agent and is just starting his career. The filmmaker worked with the great Italian casting director Chiara Polizzi, who also helped cast Josh O’Connor in Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” from last year, on the search. The handsome Marini has more charisma onscreen than his character appears to with his peers, and a sly inscrutability that makes him hard to read.
“We knew that it would be very difficult to find the right person for the role, and because the movie is all about this kid,” Tortorici said. “Because of that, we did casting all over Italy. Originally in the script, the character was from Palermo, but we knew it would be difficult. But at the end, we ended up with a perfect guy from Palermo. We saw thousands of kids. We did open castings. We knew that it would’ve been better to look into non-actors because we were looking for something very new, very fresh, very specific.”
Leonardo will remind you of the great coming-of-age characters, like Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel in the films of François Truffaut, as Tortorici crafts a bildungsroman about his hero’s sentimental and literary education. He’s got strong opinions about filmmakers including Pasolini — whose “Salò” Leonardo jerks off to in a scene that plants the seed for a much darker film beneath the surface — and is eventually labeled as someone incel-adjacent by a literary mentor. Leonardo’s sexuality is also ambiguous, with an interest in men and women hinted at, and also a fascination with a group of Siena teenagers who you can’t tell if he wants to fuck them, kill them, or be them. At one point, Leonardo looks up Justin Bieber’s nudes, which the filmmakers used without any permission or clearance, knowing the pop star will probably never see this film.
“[Leonardo] has experienced this kind of life that is books and old books and isolation in his little flat. It is a kind of death for him when he’s seeing these kids. He identifies himself with them. It’s like when a young parent identifies with his children and so in some ways tries to live some youth through them,” Tortorici said. As for the reading into Leonardo as a possible proto-incel, a term Tortorici was unfamiliar with, the director said, “‘In the final scene, the man he’s talking to, [says] ‘you remind me of ISIS,’ and there are people that are not well-integrated into society. I think he’s completely non-integrated in his social life that he sometimes tries to have. In a certain way, it’s true. He wants to stay by himself because he doesn’t feel comfortable in his life in general.”
But Tortorici doesn’t identify with the darker impulses you might read into the character, while insisting this film is torn directly from the pages of his own life. His next project will center on 16-year-olds in Palermo, Tortorici’s stomping grounds. Tortorici revealed that Guadagnino will produce that movie, set to begin pre-production this fall, as well. And he’d love to revisit Leonardo in another project, a la the Antoine Doinel films that check in on the character over the years. “I would like to tell more about his character in future, if I have the possibility,” Tortorici said.
“Diciannove” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival before heading to the Toronto Film Festival. Playtime is handling sales.
