Seattle International Film Festival 2025: Film #22
Like Charles, the beautiful suicide at the center of The Devil, Probably, Leonardo is “perfectly aware of [his] superiority,” and also like Charles is drawn to animal cruelty videos that confirm his sense of disgust.[…]
For an Italian film about tradition, repression, and guilt, Diciannove is only moderately emphatic in its treatment of Catholic themes; nevertheless it has much to say about the kind of American right-wingers, like JD Vance or Dasha, who discover in Catholicism a sense of belonging to a moral and aesthetic elect, and then bitch about Pope Francis being too woke.) Leonardo is, at times, quite vague in his descriptions of what he likes about classic Italian literature, beyond a kinship with an elevated lineage which will lift him above a world he views as unworthy. Such snobbery is common enough, maybe even laudable for the fire it lights under young people, but his raw enthusiasm risks making him dogmatic and ungenerous—one of these days, he might actually send one of the insulting texts he keeps composing and deleting.
[…]
Maybe what Leonardo needs is a good talking-to, someone to take him seriously and set him straight—and that’s what the film provides him in its final minutes. This scene, with a previously unmet character guiding Leonardo towards more open-minded taste and warning him off extremism, feels like a way to get out of the movie, a fantasy of the vitality of radical youth tempered by the wisdom of mellow age. Salinger wrote a similar scene in The Catcher in the Rye, though the Mr. Antolini episode is complicated and brought up short in a moment that is possibly an adult’s attempt at sexual grooming but more likely a boy’s prudish paranoia about it.
— Mark Asch (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: Leonardo, a 19-year-old student, leaves his hometown of Palermo to study economics in London. He soon grows restless and enrolls at the University of Siena to study literature before dropping out of school to study classics on his own. The following year, he travels to Turin where he meets a man who will help him on his journey of self-discovery.