Free Tradicals
By Mark Asch
Diciannove
Dir. Giovanni Tortorici, Italy, Oscilloscope Laboratories
A conservative is someone who would rather live in a misremembered past than an unlikely future. In the arts, this is a matter of temperament and nothing more: preferences in matters of style, for continuity or innovation, hardly track neatly onto a political alignment chart. That said, one factor in the current American environment is the enlistment of trad aesthetics in the culture war by twerps barely out of school, Groypers with X accounts and, increasingly, .gov email addresses, who may be authentically responding to the despair of growing up in a mainstream entertainment culture wrung dry of beauty, but who also launder reactionary views and vicious entitlement through praise of “the Classical.” This often amounts to posting apocalyptic dog whistles and intriguingly homoerotic pictures of Italian statuary with a tone of smug and unearned contempt.
Diciannove, the first film by Giovanni Tortorici, who is not yet out his twenties, speaks to the psychic undercurrents of this fresh Hell, while also carrying on a dialogue with the traditions of European romanticism in literature and film. Starring Manfredi Marini, in his feature-film debut, as Leonardo, the 19-year-old referred to in the film’s title, it maps out one adolescent’s lurching passion for centuries-old literature, and the walls it builds between himself and a world he scorns, out of disappointment or fear or arrogance or idealism or self-loathing. It’s a coming-of-age film at once laudably eccentric and surprisingly timely.
At first, there doesn’t appear to be much special about Leonardo. As we meet him, he’s passively preparing to go off to London to study business, nagged at by his mother for not folding his shirts properly and derided by his sister for not doing the dishes when he comes to stay with her in Hackney, where he drinks on the train to central London and almost throws up on the night bus on the way home. He gives off few outward signs, in the film’s first 20 minutes, of being the person who will suddenly stay home on a Saturday night to Google the best university programs in Italian literature, and immediately apply. He soon enrolls for classes in Siena—perhaps his blank indifference to his education, his desultory conversation in stilted foreign-student globish, was not the learned helplessness of a careless and unexceptional bro, but an expression of disquiet and ambivalence. The newly evident interest in literature hits with the rush of a college-age reinvention. And perhaps, in retrospect, there were outward flickers of his smoldering curiosity after all: the old hardback book which he brought with him but barely opened; the lingering look he gives a cute boy in the smoking area outside the club.
Tortorici, a former assistant to Luca Guadagnino, directs to evoke a feeling of youthful ardor, self-consciously so, in line with films like Trier’s Reprise, to pick one example of a film knowingly over-stylized to match the urgent literary strivings of its characters, or to the Bertolucci of Before the Revolution (the light intimations of incest between Leonardo and his sister are perhaps a tribute to Bertolucci as well). Tortorici knows that the actual circumstances of Leonardo’s life cannot support the rapture of his filmmaking—the slow dissolves, slow motion, freeze-frames, split-screens, Dutch angles, smash zooms, sight gags, all scored hyperbolically to classical music from across eras, even when the scene opens with an extreme close-up of a hypodermic needle discarded on a rain-soaked London backstreet.
Siena, with its redbrick, pre-Renaissance architecture, provides more fitting environs in which Leonardo can be the person he feels he is, or might become, even in a drab rented room with a crud-encrusted hot plate and banal flatmates he avoids. Marini is a sweet-looking kid, with a monkish face and twink’s torso, and he holds the screen and our sympathies in a performance that constantly requires him to emote solo, in ways that are more jarring and true-to-life than the usual low-key solipsism and achingly moping yearning of a young male protagonist. Leonardo spends his time in his room in gym shorts and sweatshirts, keeping odd hours, reading eagerly from Bartoli’s depictions of spiritual torment, crying to a Leopardi tribute video on YouTube, arguing out loud with long-dead authors as if thrilled by his connection to an intellectual heritage he alone views as still vital, and at one point stating, in repeated, mantra-like phrases, his desire to commit suicide. Coming as it does after the electric wiring of his old hot plate stinks up the room, it is less a statement of intent than a declaration of affinity with all those who have felt the sorrows of Young Werther in loftier circumstances than his own.
The world outside Leonardo’s fevered imagination does not live up to his expectations. He holds off the attentions of a sweet classmate who wants to add him to the WhatsApp group, evidently preferring loneliness to the company of people who seem beneath him, and blows off his professor’s (admittedly bone-dry) lectures on Dante, eventually blaming the prof’s mediocrity for his inadequate exam grade. A bit like the title character of Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, Leonardo is a study in intellectual restlessness curdling to smug impatience.
Like Charles, the beautiful suicide at the center of The Devil, Probably, he is “perfectly aware of [his] superiority,” and also like Charles is drawn to animal cruelty videos that confirm his sense of disgust. (In the end credits, a disturbing clip of factory-farm chicks being destroyed is credited to the Farm Transparency Project.) He looks at other stuff online, too, stuff that’s part of the usual age-appropriate sexual questioning but which doesn’t fit into his self-image, like paparazzi nudes of Justin Bieber. On the rare occasion when he finds someone to discuss literature with, he dismisses his interlocutor’s fave Pasolini, preferring authors with stronger “morals” —what he does not say is that he doesn’t like Pasolini because he feels weird and ashamed for having rubbed one out to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. (For an Italian film about tradition, repression, and guilt, Diciannove is only moderately emphatic in its treatment of Catholic themes; nevertheless it has much to say about the kind of American right-wingers, like JD Vance or Dasha, who discover in Catholicism a sense of belonging to a moral and aesthetic elect, and then bitch about Pope Francis being too woke.) He is, at times, quite vague in his descriptions of what he likes about classic Italian literature, beyond a kinship with an elevated lineage which will lift him above a world he views as unworthy. Such snobbery is common enough, maybe even laudable for the fire it lights under young people, but his raw enthusiasm risks making him dogmatic and ungenerous—one of these days, he might actually send one of the insulting texts he keeps composing and deleting.
The film, directed with an exciting quicksilver impulsiveness, matches Leonardo’s unfixed character; Tortorici throws the audience off-balance with near-random interludes, like a drug trip with an unnamed minor character, and with Leonardo’s own erratic impulses. He lets his room get disgusting, with maggots developing on rotten food, and becomes fixated on a high school-aged boy he sees in the town square before moving on from the crush in a matter of days. At times Diciannove resembles a modernist novel charting the oscillations of a pathological personality with bracing lack of resolution; but it’s also just reflective of the kind of person Leonardo is, a 19-year-old with a still-developing frontal cortex, who is insufferable in the way that 19-year-olds often are, especially the gifted and ambitious ones.
Maybe what Leonardo needs is a good talking-to, someone to take him seriously and set him straight—and that’s what the film provides him in its final minutes. This scene, with a previously unmet character guiding Leonardo towards more open-minded taste and warning him off extremism, feels like a way to get out of the movie, a fantasy of the vitality of radical youth tempered by the wisdom of mellow age. Salinger wrote a similar scene in The Catcher in the Rye, though the Mr. Antolini episode is complicated and brought up short in a moment that is possibly an adult’s attempt at sexual grooming but more likely a boy’s prudish paranoia about it. I can see Tortorici staging any number of variations on that scene that would speak to our moment, which is to his credit, and wish he had, which is to the film’s.