Halfway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici has taken the top spot in the ranking of the most promising new directors of 2024. The Palermo-born director, who spent several years as an assistant and apprentice under the famous Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, premiered his first feature film Nineteen Friday at the Lido. The film is competing in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on promising work by first-time or second-time directors.
A coming-of-age film that shuns all the usual stereotypes of the genre, Nineteen is a brutally honest portrait of what it feels like to be 19, full of disparate desires, intellectually ambitious and utterly lost. The film tells the story of teenager Leonardo Gravina (first-time actor Manfredi Marini), a young man who is coming into his own as he unravels after making the sudden decision to abandon his business studies in London for a literature degree in Siena, where he becomes increasingly obsessed with obscure 19th-century Italian authors. Wandering the medieval Tuscan town’s winding streets and musty apartments, Leonardo becomes the quintessential adolescent romantic, both full of youthful promise and corroded by adolescent alienation.
In an admiring review, The Hollywood Reporter Critic 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 it's also what makes Nineteen seem more real than many films that supposedly deal with being young today. In a way, Tortorici is carrying on a tradition of Italian auteur films, including Fellini The Big Calves and Pasolini Beggarabout disaffected youths who are part of a lost generation, although Leonardo seems to belong to no other group than his own.”
DAY connected with Tortorici to discuss the realization of Nineteen and how this brings to life his painful passage through youth.
How do you summarize? NineteenWhat is the premise and your cinematic approach to it?
It's about the experience of being 19. But during its trajectory through the film, the protagonist and his personality don't develop much. When the film ends, he's pretty much the same as when it started. So, it's a little different from other coming-of-age stories. The idea came from my own experience. I was very curious to explore some things I'd experienced, things that hadn't had a huge impact. I wanted to try a form of storytelling that described small everyday things, things that are a symptom of a way of being.
Did it strike you as more realistic than the usual coming-of-age genre stereotypes?
Yeah, I just tried to be authentic to what I experienced, to be as close to life as possible. I wasn't trying to follow any narrative patterns.
You shot on film rather than digital, right? What can you tell us about your visual intentions?
Yes, the film was shot in 35mm. My cinematographer, Massimiliano Kuveiller, and I did a lot of tests and lens tests and I was very attached to 35mm. The visual language of film was something very important to me. I come from a literary background. From the age of 17, I started studying literature very intensively. At a certain point, I started to imagine telling stories with cinema, but at the beginning it was very difficult for me to imagine going from literature to a cinematic language. But at a certain point, there was like a switch. I remember I was watching Suspension by Dario Argento and there's a scene almost at the beginning when the character is at the airport. There's a close-up of a sliding door, and from that moment I felt like I suddenly understood a bit of cinematic language. It's something a bit simple, but I felt like I understood. So in my film there are two moments with close-ups of sliding doors that are a little homage.
Dana Giuliano, Manfredi Marini and Vittoria Planeta in Nineteen.
Although young and handsome, the protagonist is very alienated from his body: there are little hints of body horror sprinkled throughout the film. Is that just part of the nature of adolescence for you?
Yes, at that age you can be very alienated from your 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 what happens is that you sublimate things, or you connect your passions to unpredictable things. This is a very repressed character. He's isolating himself and studying literature quite obsessively, so sometimes he's alienated from his body and his instincts. So you can see that his passions need to come out somehow. For example, he's looking for sexual encounters and in one scene he uses the excuse of not having money to buy books to explore his sexual desires by posting ads on [prostitute] himself online.
You said the film is largely autobiographical. I think it’s natural for viewers to wonder to what extent it’s autobiography or fiction. For example, the pre-modern literature that you’re so passionate about, were those your intellectual obsessions and beliefs?
Oh yeah, it's very autobiographical. Obviously, it's impossible to be 100 percent autobiographical, so I mixed in a little bit of fantasy. But in my youth, I loved literature and the books that he loves. One of the most famous Italian writers that I was obsessed with, who is in the film, was Giacomo Leopardi, who says that when you go with autobiography, you stop using rhetoric. So yeah, I try to be very faithful to what I experienced. I lived in Siena and the apartment that you see in the film is the same apartment that I lived in more than nine years ago, we shot in the same room. The costume designer that I work with, Maria Antonia Tortorici, is my sister. So she knew very well who I was at that time and what kind of things we were wearing. Together, we went to our parents' house in Palermo and found our old clothes and we used a lot of them to dress the characters. Even the first scene of the film, where the mother says to her son: “Why do you sleep in your sister's room?” That scene was shot in my sister's old room in my parents' house in Palermo.
So, how do you feel now, after having interrogated your past so deeply, after having exorcised it in a certain sense or brought it artistically to the screen?
I feel happy. You know, as time goes by you lose some of your memories. So I think it was good for me to have done this and in a way stopped time. It's a bit like Proust and Remembrance of things past. It makes me very happy to have represented how it was. And not just for ego. When I was a child I would have loved to be able to watch a movie or read a book that represented the personal experience of someone at that age with full sincerity. So I tried to do that also for other young people who are like me.
Nineteen
Of course, I was very struck by the final dialogue with the character of the older and richer art collector, who bluntly asks the protagonist the questions that the audience probably asked themselves: essentially, why is this young man like this?
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, psychoanalytic perspective in some ways. I don't know, maybe I was a little scared that after being so close to the character, the audience would somehow believe that the film's point was that he is right in his opinions and that he is as intelligent as he thinks he is. Maybe I had that subconscious fear, so I needed a character who would come in and do a little bit of a teardown of the protagonist's character, someone more in touch with philosophy, psychoanalysis and life experience. I think that's why I felt we needed this scene, but I'm not sure. I have to think about it more myself.
After such a personal and autobiographical film, I can't help but wonder what the future of your work will be.
I actually wrote another screenplay. I was a little tempted to go in a more fictional direction, telling a story that was far from my own experience. But I think every story you tell becomes personal and ends up reflecting you. I remember the classic Flaubert quote, “Madame Bovary, c'est moi.” 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 lived was completely different. But at 19 my life was very intellectually driven, but when I was 16 it was like a Larry Clark story: drugs and girls and wild adolescence, in a way funny and in another way terrible. So I thought I would be sad if I lost those memories, so I wrote a screenplay about it. When I showed this screenplay to some producers and some of my collaborators, they said they were amazed at how different it was from Nineteen although it is also based on my experiences.
So, instead of moving away from your personal experience, you deepen it.
(Laughter) Yes, but in the future I would also like to explore other things. I actually love genre films, thrillers, even kung fu films. So we'll see.