Midway through the 81st Venice Film Festival, Italian director Giovanni Tortorici has topped the festival’s selection of the most promising new directors of 2024. He worked as an assistant and apprentice for the famous Italian director Luca for several years. Guadagnino premiered his first feature film. nineteen Friday at Lido. The film is in competition in the festival’s “Horizon” section, which focuses on promising work from first- or second-time filmmakers.
A coming-of-age film that eschews all the familiar tropes of the genre, nineteen A brutally honest portrait of what it’s like to be 19, full of different desires, intellectually ambitious, yet completely lost. The film tells the story of teenage Leonardo Gravina (Manfredi Marini), a young man who suddenly decides to abandon his business studies in London to study literature in Siena After the degree, I gradually came to myself, but also fell into collapse. Wandering the winding streets and musty tenements of the medieval Tuscan city, Leonardo becomes the quintessential teenage romantic, both imbued with youthful hope and corrupted by adolescent alienation.
In an admirable review, hollywood reporter Critic Jordan Mintzer wrote: “The film’s complete abandonment of plot takes the viewer away from looking for some guiding principle or shaping of Leonardo’s life, but it also makes nineteen More authentic than many so-called movies about today’s youth. In some respects, Tortorici follows in the tradition of Italian art films, including Fellini’s Vitelloni and Pasolini’s beggarabout disaffected young men from a lost generation, although Leonardo doesn’t seem to belong to any other group but his own.
THR Contact Tortorici to discuss production nineteen And how it put him through a traumatic youth.
how do you sum up nineteenpremise and your approach to the film?
It’s about the experience of being 19. But throughout the trajectory of his films, the protagonist and his personality don’t develop much. At the end of the movie, he’s the same as he was at the beginning. So, it’s a little different from other coming-of-age stories. This idea comes from my own experience. I was curious and wanted to explore some of the things I’d experienced, things that didn’t have a huge impact. I wanted to experiment with a narrative form that describes small things in everyday life—things that are symptoms of a way of being.
Is this appealing to you because it’s more relevant to life than your average coming-of-age type trope?
Yeah, I just try to express my experience authentically – as close to life as possible. I’m not trying to follow any narrative scheme at all.
You shoot on film rather than digital, right? Can you share your visual intention?
Yes, the film was shot in 35mm. I did a lot of rehearsals and lens testing with my DP, Massimiliano Kuveiller, and I really liked the 35mm. The visual language of this film was very important to me. I have a literary background. From the age of 17, I began to study literature very seriously. At a certain point, I started imagining telling stories through film, but at first I had a hard time imagining the switch from literary language to cinematic language. But at some point, it’s like a switch. I remember watching Susperia Created by Dario Argento, there is a scene near the beginning where the characters are at an airport. There was a close-up of a sliding door – and from that moment on, I felt like I suddenly understood some of the language of cinema. Things are a bit simple, but I think I get it. So in my film, there are two moments with close-ups of sliding doors, which is a little homage.
Dana Giuliano, Manfredi Marini and Victoria Planeta nineteen.
Although the protagonist is young and beautiful, he is very alienated from his body – there is little sign of body horror throughout the film. Is this just part of the nature of adolescence for you?
Yes, at that age, I think, you can be very alienated from your body due to general neurosis. Because at that age you have a lot of passions and it’s not easy to understand them, so sometimes what happens is you sublimate things, or you associate your passions with things that are unpredictable. This is a very depressing character. He isolated himself and studied literature so obsessively that he sometimes alienated himself from his body and instincts. So you can see his passion needs to come out in some way. For example, he is looking for sexual encounters, and in one scene he uses the excuse of not having money to buy a book to explore his sexuality by posting an ad on the following website: [prostitute] Go online yourself.
You mentioned that the film is largely autobiographical. I think viewers will naturally wonder to what extent it is autobiography versus fiction. For example, the premodern literature that he was so passionate about—were these your intellectual obsessions and beliefs?
Oh yeah, it’s very autobiographical. Obviously, it’s impossible to be 100% autobiographical, so I mixed in a little bit of fantasy. But when I was younger, I loved the literature and books he loved. Giacomo Leopardi, a very famous Italian writer that I’m obsessed with (and also featured in the movie), said that when you write an autobiography, you stop using rhetoric. So, yes, I try to stay true to my experience. I live in Siena and the apartment you see in the film is exactly the same apartment I lived in nine years ago – we shot in the same room. The costume designer I work with is Maria Antonia Tortorici, she’s my sister. So she knew exactly who I was during that period and what kind of clothes we wore. We went together to our parents’ house in Palermo and found our old clothes, and we used a lot of them to dress the characters. Even in the first scene of the movie, the mother says to the boy, “Why are you sleeping 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, having looked so deeply into your past—having exorcised it, or brought it all out in an artistic way on screen?
I feel very happy. You know, over time, you lose some memories. So I thought it would be good for me to make this and stop time in some way. It’s a bit like Proust Reminiscing about the past. I’m excited to represent what it is. Not just out of ego. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be able to watch a movie or read a movie or book that honestly represented the personal experiences of someone that age. So I try to do that for other young people like me as well.
nineteen
Of course, I was fascinated by the closing conversation with the older, wealthy art collector character, who bluntly poses to the protagonist the question the audience may have been asking themselves – essentially, why is this young man acting like this?
In the first hour and 30 minutes of the film, you get very close to the character and his neuroses. To some extent, I think you need a more mature psychoanalytic perspective to some extent. I don’t know, maybe I’m a little scared, that after being so close to this character, the audience might be convinced on some level that the film’s point of view is that his point of view is valid and that he is as smart as he thinks he is. Maybe I had that unconscious fear, so I needed a character to do some damage to the protagonist’s character – someone who was more in touch with philosophy, psychoanalysis and life experience. I guess that’s why I feel like we need this scene, but I’m not sure. I need to think about it more myself.
After watching a film that is so personal and autobiographical, I can’t help but wonder where your work will lead next.
I’ve actually written another script. I kind of wanted to go in a more fictional direction and tell a story that was far removed from my personal experience. But I think every story you tell becomes personal and ultimately reflects your situation. I remembered Flaubert’s classic saying: “Madame Bovary is me.” So I began to think about how different I was when I was 16 years old and when I was 19 years old. The social environment and lifestyle were completely different. But at 19 my life was very intellectually driven, but when I was 16 it was like a Larry Clark kind of story – drugs and girls and wild adolescence – in some In some ways it’s funny, in some it’s terrible. So I thought I would be sad if I lost these memories, so I wrote a script about it. When I showed this script to some of the producers and some of my collaborators, they said they were surprised how close it was to nineteen Although this is also based on my experience.
So instead of venturing away from your personal experience, you’re venturing deeper into it.
(laugh) Yes, but there are other things I would like to explore in the future. I actually like genre films, thrillers, and even kung fu films. So we’ll see.
