DICIANNOVE - Mark Reviews Movies

Diciannove, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 24, 2025

Writer/director Giovanni Tortorici's debut feature Diciannove certainly captures the sense of being 19 and, more specifically, of a very particular sort of young man. His name is Leonardo (Manfredi Marini), and he's sure that everything he does, says, and thinks about everything must be correct. At that age and with the sheltered life the young guy has apparently lived, the only things he really knows about come from his actions, words, and thoughts. How could they be wrong?

There's a level of honesty here that's blunt and, at times, unsettling, if only because Leonardo is so sure of himself that it's sure to get himself in trouble one of these days or maybe result in him trying to harm someone who challenges his preconceptions too well. In Tortorici's movie, that day never really comes for the teenager, who's very much still a child in a lot of ways but desperately wants to be seen as an adult, or, thankfully, for Leonardo's anger being directed at someone else.

He is an angry young man, to be sure, although Leonardo has a habit of hiding it within his intellectual pursuits and beneath a thick layer of moralism. There's an apparent trend that more and more young people are becoming more and more conservative in newer generations, but that perspective might not be as new as people imagine. The kids are just as vocal and rebellious in whatever way they need to rebel as they always were, but their voices are, well, simply more public in an age in which social media allows everyone's thoughts to be as public as possible.

Leonardo probably won't seem any different to those who have met—or maybe been—a young man like him decades ago than to those who might know—or be—a teen like him right now, in other words. People have phases of attitude and personality, and there's still some hope at the end of this movie that Leonardo could grow out and beyond his rigid worldview and his belief that everything he believes about the world must be right. Again, the day that such a hope might be fulfilled doesn't come in this story, but who's to say what being 20, 21, 25, or 30 will bring for the kid.

This, of course, means that Tortorici's screenplay exists entirely within the mindset and the rather dull life of a 19-year-old man-child who's pretty much antagonistic to change. Oh, his interests and environments change, to be sure, since Leonardo begins as a soon-to-be college student who wants to take up economic studies in London, where his older sister Arianna (Vittoria Planeta) currently lives and goes to school. After spending some time living and occasionally going out to clubs with the sister and her friends, Leonardo decides that the swinging old town isn't for him.

Instead, he enrolls at a college in Siena, which is a bit closer to his hometown of Palermo but far enough away that he doesn't have to deal with his mother (played by Maria Pia Ferlazzo), who worries about her son in a way the young man resents and, basically, sees as a series of personal attacks. Leonardo gives up economics, too, and decides to pursue literature, with a focus on the Italian classics. Anything from after the start of the 19th century, apparently, is too modern and, hence, too corrupt for him. At one point in his lengthy monologues, he states that the entirety of the 20th century was a waste when it came to the arts and culture.

Leonardo's monologues, by the way, are aimed at anyone who will listen, which is to say that he spends a lot of time in his room alone when he offers those speeches. We see him on the phone a lot when he goes into a rant, and the suggestion is that there's likely no one on other end of the line. It's not as if he has any friends at school, since he avoids going out, or he cares what his family thinks about him or his ideas. He speechifies, anyway—about how much he knows about the works of Dante Alighieri, how little his professor knows compared to him, and how unfair it is that he has to read critical analysis from anyone born after 1800 to pass an exam on the subject.

The young man is pretty irritating, even though and, in a way, because we know exactly who he is. Ultimately, that is the point of Tortorici's story, which rambles much like its protagonist over the same points over and over again, and filmmaking, which stays with the character and stylistically reflects his mix of sharp focus, sudden breaks of concentration, and the effects of living an increasingly reclusive life.

We get that point shortly after Leonardo arrives in Siena, and from there, the point is made again and again, until a random character appears at the end to sum up the lesson for us. Diciannove is a bold character study in certain ways, but its determination to show us the extent of a hollow, naïve character also makes it, unfortunately, a boring one, too.

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