No one talks much about turning 19. It doesn’t come with the thrilling avalanche of adult rights that comes with turning 18, or the symbolism of turning 21. You’re still technically a teenager but you don’t feel it; yet the impending onset of your twenties is eerie, as if a chapter of your youth is about to close. It’s the age of passage, in other words, and Leonardo, the 19-year-old protagonist of Italian writer-director Giovanni Tortoresi’s extraordinary feature debut, Dessianove, feels transitional, neglected, neither here nor there.
As Leonardo stumbles through his first year of college, chasing a clear idea of who he’s supposed to be, the safe ground of childhood crumbles beneath him, and adulthood hovers just beyond his reach. Tortorici clearly remembers that awkward feeling of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve fully found yourself; and if you haven’t, his funny, tense, and unevenly framed film will give you chills. It’s a welcome arrival for both the director and his strong, volatile young star, Manfredi Marini, who handles the camera with the innocence of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.
“Diciannove” (which means “nineteen” in Italian, and looks set to remain an international title), produced by Luca Guadagnino, with whom Tortorese previously worked as an assistant director, sounds like a familiar film on paper: another coming-of-age study centered on a buffoonish but charismatic teenager with unfulfilled desires, big ideas, and a lot to figure out on all fronts. What makes it unique and unusually original in the subgenre is its avoidance of the poignant growth arc that tends to give such stories their backbone. “Diciannove” meanders wildly along Leonardo’s erratic moods and motivations, offering him no sappy life lessons or self-realizations—just erratic slivers of knowledge and sometimes grim lived experience that ultimately shape him.
The film presents us with Leonardo on the verge of changing his life for the better: packing his bags to leave the family home in Palermo for London, where he is set to begin studying business administration, while his mother (Maria Pia Ferlazzo) is disturbing the nervous atmosphere in the family home, which is now empty of children. It is a big step into the world for someone who grew up entirely on an island, and Leonardo – intelligent, curious, well-read, and who we soon discover is dealing with his emerging homosexuality – clearly wants to be part of something bigger. But he is anxious about the trip, and suffers from a severe nosebleed that seems to be a manifestation of his repressed anxiety.
Arriving in London, he is greeted by his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta, superb) as a prison escapee might greet an accomplice. (Credit to photographer Massimiliano Cuvelier for capturing the striking contrast in light between the pale Sicilian sun and the bleak British summer, though for Arianna it is a grey haze of freedom.) Taking a room in her dingy but central Hoxton flat, he is initially swept up in Arianna’s big-city lifestyle of nightclubs, heavy drinking and casual sex, though the glow soon fades, and his naivety is exposed: he can’t stand booze, and his housekeeping skills are a real risk to his health.
But more importantly, he finally admits to himself that he has no interest in studying business, and he is too far from home to pursue his true passion: Italian literature. In one elegant passage—Marco Costa’s quick-fire editing is in tune with the pace and chaos of youthful whimsy—he boards a train to the Tuscan university town of Siena, where he enrolls in a degree program in literature. It is a triumph of personal independence, but that does not mean that Leonardo’s life will simply fall into place from here on out. Still insecure and socially awkward, he quickly alienates his roommates, rejects a potential group of friends, and angers his professors, whose readings of texts he finds sloppy and off-target. In some ways, he is right; in others, he is not quite the brilliant thinker he likes to think he is.
But wait, how many people are 19? Marini acts very shy, balancing the relatable Leonardo with his stubborn antics, his sometimes healthy ego with his reclusive self-doubt. When two girls who pass by remark that he's cute—and he is, perhaps more than he knows—his haughty shyness as he thanks them is a thing of beauty.
Tortorrisi also manages to capture the contradictions of the character, moving from straightforward reality to tense montage to animated embellishment, as Leonardo tries on different versions of himself. Almost nothing is resolved by the end of “Diciannove,” just as almost nothing is resolved when you finally leave adolescence for your twenties. Leonardo may be distracted by exams, annoying applications, and crises of confidence, but he still has time to seize the day.
