Movie Review: To be Pretty, Young and Italian, Figuring It Out at “Diciannove”

Giovanni Tortorici’s “Diciannove” is a dreamy, drifting odyssey into a time in youth when one discovers the meaning of “the world’s your oyster.”

It’s about a young Italian with choices at an age when you know it all and you know nothing and you follow your impusles, figuring everything out on the way — 19.

That’s what the movie’s title means, and that’s the year we float through with our middle class Italian anti-hero, Leonardo (Manfred Marini). He will wander from Palermo to London, Siena to Turin, changing majors and colleges, getting pass-out drunk with friends and family, debating professors and reading 14th century Italian writers.

He will start writing himself, experiment with solitude and sexuality and ponder suicide and perhaps becoming a rent boy to make ends meet.

Yeah. “Nineteen.”

We meet him as his mother is the first to label him a disorganized, doesn’t-sweat-details “moron,” on his way to join his sister (Vittoria Planeta) in her shared apartment in London. A few days of drunken clubbing, getting chewed-out for not helping around the house, eating others’ food and the like and that London university degree in “business” goes out the window like the dream it was.

He applies online to a university in Siena, sets off to study literature, buys books and fails to avoid coming off as a standoffish loner.

“I want to commit suicide,” he writes and recites (in Italian with English subtitles). “I want to kill myself…I want to die…I want to croak…Snuff it…Pass away.”

Writers and their “mantras.”

Of course, it’s all a phase as this poster child for the arrogance of bourgeois youth takes exams without attending lectures, composes a jeremiad against his professor, but chickens out of distributing it, begs mom for money and gets chewed out by his dad as he walks the streets of the old city, buying books and thinking and just generally “figuring it out.”

It’s a mesmerizing movie, in its way, a chronological stream-of-consciousness dissection of a very specific “type” — Western, indulged, pretty enough to attract attention, careless with how he uses it, too removed from his contemporaries to care or commit.

Semi-autobiographical or not, our writer-director has picked his target and hit it in delivering a portrait of youth that tries everything before settling on one thing to make the “fanatical” focus of one’s life. Realizing “We’re not as interesting as we think we are at 19” is just a bonus.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations, teen alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: Manfredi Marini, Vittoria Planeta, Luca Lazzareschi and
Zackari Delmas

Cfedits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Tortorici. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:48