Writer and Director: Giovanni Tortorici
Giovanni Tortorici’s film about teenage kicks in Sicily ought really to be called Giulio rather than Ketticè. In a strong performance, Salvatore Gallina is the 16-year-old boy from a rich family. Despite a private school education, he’s struggling with his studies. He falls in with hard girl Ketticè (Ketty), who has a reputation for fighting and who lives in a tower block in Palermo. The two of them spend most of the film smoking dope.
It’s not clear why Tortorici has chosen to set his brash movie in 2012. The kids all use Facebook, but living for likes and followers is just as prevalent today on Insta and TikTok. There’s a short clip of Silvio Berlusconi on the 2013 election campaign on the TV that Giulio watches, but there’s little else that anchors this story of teenage ennui to this era. Perhaps the only difference between then and now is that rather than having teenagers ensconced in their bedrooms, these Sicilian teenagers actually meet face to face, IRL.
They seem to go out every night. They hang in piazzas, drink at street corner bars and dance in nightclubs. Giulio is so stoned most of the time that he hardly attends football practice. The film begins with a soccer match that is mostly brawling on the pitch rather than any demonstration of ball skills. To the loud pumping sound of Flo Rida’s Right Round, the match is filmed like a music video, with split screens and some slo-mo sections, suggesting that this movie is targeted towards a younger audience.
While Tortorici never delivers such an energetic scene as this again, there are plenty of annoying slo-mo shots of people, girls especially, walking into town squares. Once the camera lingers on a boy’s face, hinting at homoerotic desire, but this is never picked up again in the film. Giulio’s relationship with Ketty (Rachele Testagrossa) appears to be chaste; they are affectionate to each other on the phone, but their friendship is based firmly on weed. They drive to the bad ends of Palermo to buy it, and sit in the car to smoke it. Little else happens.
The best drug films, such as Human Traffic and Eden, are the ones that aren’t too preachy about the dangers of addiction. Tortorici is a little heavy-handed in his argument that weed smoked in such vast amounts leads to health issues. One of Giulio’s friends becomes a heroin addict while others talk about coke and MDMA.
Some much-needed light relief comes from the adult actors. Monica Bellucci has great fun as the vampish mother of Giulio. She jabbers on about going to Dignitas in Switzerland, so unloved by her family is she. But the biggest laughs come from Giulio’s brutally honest school teacher, played acerbically by Davide Cirri. He tells his pupils that they are the worst class that he’s ever taught in his career and that their future lies in picking potatoes in a field. Possibly his unprofessionalism is meant to be a reason why Giulio has gone off the rails, but with such a dire bunch of students, it’s hard not to sympathise with the teacher.
The almost pornographic ending, replete with more slo-mo, is a punchline we don’t need at all. It just cheapens what has come before. Drugs are bad, and teenagers are angry and randy is the message of this film.
Ketticè is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
