10/08/2026 - Giovanni Tortorici’s second feature tackles adolescent disaffection in a sweltering Palermo, but its coming-of-age narrative is somewhat aimless

Palermo, 2012. Sixteen-year-old Giulio (Salvatore Gallina) seems interested in little beyond driving his mini-car, football, girls, joints and wasting time with his friends. School inspires no enthusiasm, the future barely exists, and communication with his parents has all but broken down. Then he meets the more headstrong Ketty (Rachele Testagrossa), with whom he develops an increasingly exclusive friendship. This is the loose, unoriginal foundation of Ketticè, Giovanni Tortorici’s second feature, after his Venice Orizzonti debut, Nineteen. Screened in competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, it’s a film that often feels less like a finished work than the confused first draft of several different ones.

There is potentially something truthful in its shapelessness. Tortorici deals with teenagers in a culturally stagnant Palermo, kids with nowhere particularly urgent to go: violent girls and lazy boys smoking weed, messing around, flirting and shouting at one another. Yet what may initially resemble an attempt to reproduce adolescent aimlessness soon becomes a problem in itself: most of these supporting characters remain interchangeable and almost entirely devoid of depth.

Even Giulio and Ketty’s relationship is barely sketched out. They smoke together, exchange the occasional confidence and apparently become inseparable, but Ketticè never quite establishes where their bond comes from, where it is heading, or whether its occasional ambiguity might develop into something else. It simply exists.

That would matter less if Giulio underwent some recognisable transformation. Yet Ketticè is a coming-of-age film conspicuously lacking any personal progression. He starts off apathetic towards his studies, gradually loses whatever enthusiasm he had for football, remains interested in girls and drugs, and ends the film with remarkably little having shifted. Events occur; an evolution does not.

The adults fare little better. Giulio’s mother, played by Monica Bellucci, speaks in such an affected register that she often sounds like a printed page, rather than a person. The grandmother pushes this even further, while Giulio’s largely absent father appears to have wandered in from another film. Performances frequently sink to remarkably low levels, hardly helped by the bombastic dialogue. The notable exceptions are Giulio’s exasperated teacher, Professor Sanfilippo (Davide Cirri), and Gallina himself, who convincingly maintains the deliberately lazy, pissed-off and slightly dazed register required by his character.

The same lack of direction affects Tortorici’s filmmaking. An Arab-inflected musical motif introduces Giulio’s tedious routine between school and five-a-side football, only to resurface once again later on in oddly didactic fashion. Slow motion appears to be used seemingly at random, while several compositions are conspicuously crooked or leave inexplicable amounts of empty space above the actors’ heads.

Most baffling is a fight sequence chopped up with frantic jump cuts, producing an almost epileptic effect. It culminates in a girl running into a nearby pizzeria, stealing a pizza peel and using it to knock someone down. Even within the pic’s deliberately rough, adolescent Palermo, the incident feels less spontaneous than simply contrived.

There are laughs – some intentional, some decidedly less so – and a handful of lines genuinely land. The thick Sicilian spoken by many youngsters may also leave even Italian viewers wishing for subtitles. Drugs, class, family authority, friendship and adolescent disaffection surface, but almost exclusively as suggestions, rather than developed ideas.

This is Ketticè’s fundamental problem. Tortorici appears interested in reconstructing a specific adolescence – Palermo in 2012, politically and culturally immobile, populated by teenagers with precious little idealism and plenty of time to waste on the then-new Facebook. But the fact that such an adolescence existed does not automatically make its recollection dramatically compelling.

The film never finds the event, revelation or shift capable of giving shape to its succession of episodes. Its ending could almost appear at the beginning or halfway through without fundamentally altering Giulio’s trajectory. Ketticè leaves us not with the productive uncertainty of adolescence, but with a simpler question: why, exactly, was this the story we needed to be told?

Ketticè was produced by Frenesy Film Company (Italy), The Apartment (Italy), MeMo Films (Italy) and PiperFilm (Italy), in collaboration with Rai Cinema and First Picture (France). PiperPlay handles its international sales.