Some coming-of-age movies explore teenage emotions through an adult lens of memory, while others, like Giovanni Tortorici’s Ketticè, screening in competition at BFI London Film Festival, take you right back into the tornado of adolescence and all its chaos.
By the time you reach your late forties and early fifties, the short time you spent as a teenager begins to feel like a distant memory. If anything, those adolescent memories become even more clouded than your childhood ones. Still, even if those memories are no longer clear, the feelings your teenage brain scrambled together in haste often remain.
I remember those teenage emotions as a whirlwind of no escape; you know, a bit like Dorothy trapped in the spinning house at the centre of a tornado, watching things fly past the window. One minute you’re sad, and the next you’re horny, or you might hit rock-bottom before becoming almost euphoric. Our parents were an embarrassment in public, and their nagging was enough to make you grind your teeth, but our friends were everything, and the longer we were out of the house, the better. Some coming-of-age movies explore these emotions through an adult lens of memory, while others, like Giovanni Tortorici’s Ketticè, take you right back into the tornado of adolescence and all its chaos.
Set in Palermo in 2012, a year when Facebook was the go-to social media service for most teens, and Twitter was growing exponentially, we meet 16-year-old Giulio (Salvatore Gallina). Giulio is a drifter who would much rather hang out with his mates, play football, and get off with girls than attend school, much to the chagrin of his mum, who does all the heavy lifting at home. He smokes a lot of weed, hangs around the piazza indulging in all the teenage gossip and occasional fights (although he is yet to see two girls fight, which is on his wishlist), and spends an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. In many ways, he is just your average teenage boy. He is perpetually horny, uncertain of his place and purpose and always seeking escape from the realities of life.
After his girlfriend dumps him via text, just after getting off with him on a street corner, Giulio hits the rebound button and meets Ketty (Rachele Tesagrossa), who shares his apathy for the world and his love of cannabis. Soon a friendship blooms around seeking out weed, escaping life, and debating just how shit everything is. They love each other, but not in a sexual sense; they build a world of their own in Giulio’s car, as smoke billows out the windows and passersby tut at their blazen drug use.
Like most teenage relationships, there are ups and downs, disagreements, and eventually a separation as Giulio begins to question whether their drug use has gone too far, and Ketty states matter-of-factly that she is now bored of it. Ketticè is full of these random teenage decisions and detours that most coming-of-age pictures ignore, yet were central to the teenage experience we all had.
There are clear messages in the unpredictability at the heart of Tortorici’s film, from the snowball effect of casual drug use as a form of escape during our teens, to a growing sense of adolescent detachment from society in an emerging social media-driven world. These more serious discussions are paired with moments of beautifully scripted comedy, from a family dinner with an outspoken, old-school Italian Grandma, which holds all the simmering tension you might expect, to pointless arguments, sudden splits, and a car that becomes a bong-on-wheels. Still, Ketticé is ultimately a film less interested in story than in its true-to-life portrait of teenage life.
Produced by Luca Guadagnino, Ketticè sits somewhere between classic teenage slacker comedy and the far grittier socio-realism of filmmakers like Larry Clark. Throughout Ketticé, you almost feel as if the camera is being directed by a young person experimenting with the medium of film alongside their friends; it’s an aesthetic that leads to a sense of realism that some will adore, and others will find challenging to follow as the movie travels along at a brisk, arbitrary pace just like its main character, who steadily becomes more and more stoned as we progress. Ketticè rejects all rules and ultimately forges its own path, just like the teens it follows.
Performances are rooted in this realism, with Salvatore Gallina’s Giulio neither likeable nor unlikable as he steers his own path, while his exasperated mother (Monica Bellucci) attempts to control his behaviour with fits of anger, frustration and desperation, as his father chooses to take a back seat in his son’s teenage life.
As the film closes, one chapter in Giulio’s life also comes to a close and a new one opens as education once more becomes appealing, not through a sudden reality check but through a rather attractive personal tutor hired by his parents. It’s the start of a new chapter in the brief but turbulent road to adulthood, in a film that understands just how fleeting, obscure, and chaotic adolescence is.
Related Posts
Follow Us