Diciannove

DICIANNOVE   ***1/2

Giovanni Tortorici

2024

IDEA:  The misadventures of a young Italian literature student in the mid-2010s. 

BLURB:  There’s more than a little Holden Caulfield in Leonardo Gravina, the 19-year-old protagonist of Giovanni Tortorici’s brash debut feature. At once insolent and erudite, he rants impotently about the perceived phoniness of academic authority and buries his insecurities under an air of moral superiority. Manfredi Marini imbues Leonardo with mercurial posture and temperament: he’ll appear as a callow, even cherubic kid one moment then as a hedonistic malcontent or hungry intellectual the next, confounding expectations of what a Gen Z adolescent — or any person, really — might be like, privately and publicly, in the lifelong process of becoming. Leonardo’s recalcitrance also calls to mind the Angry Young Men of the British New Wave, and his erratic impulses are cogently reflected in a cinematic style bursting with the invention of that and other contemporaneous New Waves. Diciannove is exhilarating in its formal play, where truly anything seems to go; slow motion, freeze frames, crash zooms, exaggerated camera angles, split screens, intertitles, and animation are just some of the devices with which Tortorici floods the screen. He deforms classical film grammar so thoroughly you genuinely can’t predict what the next shot will look like; it could just as easily be a character stepping over the camera on a sunlit Tuscan street as a viral video of live chicks falling into an incinerator. Accusations of indulgence write themselves, and it’s true the syntactic chaos sometimes feels driven by nothing more than randomness. But if this decadent stylistic gallimaufry were to work anywhere, one of the places would surely be a portrait of a curious, carnal, distracted, befuddled, overzealous young adult. The ostentatiousness of Diciannove is ultimately indivisible from its pleasures and meanings alike, channeling a restive period of young adulthood with potent affective force.

Los Olvidados

LOS OLVIDADOS   ***1/2

Luis Buñuel

1950

IDEA:  Trouble comes to a youth street gang in Mexico City when the gang's leader escapes from jail.

BLURB:  In keeping with a cinematic tradition of social realism, Los Olvidados is brief, blunt, and unremittingly bleak; it has little of Buñuel’s typical surrealism but all of his ferocious indignation at the inequities of capitalist, Christian society. The messaging is so overt that the film — which opens with stock footage and a voiceover describing how modern cities conceal “malnourished children without hygiene” and are a “breeding ground for future delinquents” — could be called didactic. But Buñuel is never so simplistic. Within the almost curtly abbreviated runtime, he depicts an underclass that is both victim and victimizer, with no noble hero to guide or palliate our identification. The common currency in this world is violence, promulgated between adults and children who have naturalized it as a means of survival. Buñuel avoids creating a false moral center; everyone enacts some form of abuse, whether it’s a mother scorning her son, kids ravaging a blind street performer, or the blind street performer, in turn, molesting a girl and even killing a man. It’s a merciless, stark picture, visually situated between the studio-bound chiaroscuro of Hollywood crime films and the ground-level vérité of Italian neorealism. Buñuel does offer some surrealist touches, such as an eerie slow-motion dream sequence and the mischievous punctum of the young protagonist throwing a raw egg right at the camera. As in some of De Sica’s films, these moments counterbalance and set into relief the deprivations of the characters’ reality, soberingly pointing up the humanity that dies in the darkness.

Exit 8

EXIT 8   **

Genki Kawamura

2025

IDEA:  When he discovers that he's trapped in a subway tunnel that inexplicably goes around in circles, a soon-to-be father needs to learn a game to find the exit.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Exit 8 reaches the peak of its intriguing eeriness in the first 15 minutes, when first-person filmmaking unnervingly puts us in the shoes of a man who finds he’s trapped in an infinitely looping subway tunnel. Replicating the logic of the video game, the zigzagging spatial layout creates suspense about what surprise might appear behind each monotonously white-tiled corner, while also posing a challenge to the player/viewer’s attention, memory, and perhaps even sanity. Does this maddeningly inescapable space represent the endless grind of workaday life under capitalism? Is it a purgatorial trial meant to test the moral fiber and flexibility of people who have made questionable life decisions? Yes and yes, as Exit 8 makes explicit in a script that has very little faith in its audience to understand subtext. The considerable tension and mystery built up by Kawamura quickly evaporate as more characters are introduced and the story fully flattens into the clichéd, moralizing parable of reluctant fatherhood it teased from the first of a hundred crying baby sounds. When the mute, cherubic “Boy” appears, it becomes groaningly obvious where this is headed, and what the protagonist will have to do to redeem himself and secure his escape. To their credit, Kazunari Ninomiya invests gravitas in his paper-thin protagonist-avatar, and Keisuke Imamura’s camerawork nimbly navigates shifting character perspectives and vectors in a confined space. It’s too bad they’re stuck serving a script that never really advances past Exit 1.