RaiPlay’s “FOMO”. Portraying teenagers without lengthy sociological explanations

Adolescence – that is to say, that complicated phenomenon which should always be referred to in the plural, ‘adolescences’ – is now discussed almost exclusively in terms of emergencies, bans and special laws: fights resulting in death, recruitment on the dark web, stabbings, schools imposing caps on foreign pupils and bans on burqas and smartphones, suicidal tendencies, depression, fears, fragility, addiction to psychotropic drugs and social media. Adolescents are always portrayed as symbols of distress, living illustrations of a problem – much like migrants in Italian cinema. For the past few days, on RaiPlay – as a bit of a break from it all – there’s been a short docuseries that simply tries to tell the story of teenagers’ lives – without any lengthy sociological explanations. It’s called “FOMO” – that is, Fear Of Missing Out, the fear of being left out of what others are doing, if we really must explain the title to those from the 1900s (we won’t use the word beginning with ‘B’, not even under threat).

As they say in these cases, ‘FOMO’ is a gamble: a year of cameras following a year group at Vittoria Colonna High School – a language-focused school in the centre of Rome, not a school for wealthy ‘chosen ones’, nor a school in the suburbs in need of redemption. The crew spent a year documenting lessons, parties, 18th birthday celebrations and the ‘100-day’ countdowns, even entering their homes and bedrooms adorned with posters or neon signs above the bed. The result is twelve episodes, entirely unscripted and featuring no professional actors, as the countdown to the final year of school ticks away. Herein lies a small miracle: because the diary of a single person – whether the old-fashioned paper one with a padlock, or even the one on TikTok – gets boring after a while. But a collective diary, where voices intertwine, contradict one another and betray one another, begins to resemble a grand novel, with plots that tie themselves together and draw you in. Pietro Daviddi and David Gallerano, the two directors of the series (produced by Our Films), take thousands of hours of unscripted life and extract plot twists that really pack a punch: the friend who vanishes, the romance that collapses overnight, the fall, the rise. The students exchange voice messages that sound like podcasts; they cry and laugh mostly in front of a screen; they diss each other like rappers and trappers; they say ‘let’s ask my best friend ChatGPT’ to sort out any doubts. Observed from the perspective of the 20th century, they appear almost alien: what common ground could possibly exist between these young people, born after Tiziano Ferro’s fourth album and the subprime mortgage crisis, and an older generation? Yet the series then accomplishes something unexpected. Setting aside the fact that, at my age, viewers of teen films or coming-of-age narratives typically identify only with the parents’ anxieties, FOMO actually reassured me. Because at the heart of all those things that didn’t exist when I was at school – the smartphone society, emoticons, social media live streams, hyper-connectivity, the horror vacui of endless scrolling – there’s also the adolescence of old, the one from "Tempo delle mele", a film I now rewatch, identifying only with the parents or Sophie Marceau’s grandmother, yet finding, as in ‘FOMO’, the same elements of every adolescence: the exact same rollercoaster ride, the mid-afternoon euphoria and crash, the flash of unrequited love, the cosmic tragedy of the wrong dress. It is, therefore, a ‘Tempo delle mele’ set in the microcosm of a Roman secondary school – an ever-so ‘significant’ outpost, with the student representative already a bit unbearable, like the whole lot of them, and with that assembly rhetoric he’ll use in the coming years to climb the ranks of the PD secretariat (politics, as we know, is the continuation of Roman secondary schools by other means). In short: you laugh, you cry, you’re moved, ‘things happen’.

Chats, voice messages, stories – all the material that the young people film and write for themselves becomes a collective narrative and blends with their private confessions at home – a mix of fiction, reality TV, talent shows and investigative reporting: there’s Il collegio but also Baby, Skam Italia and a touch of Euphoria. Above all, it brings to mind “Boyhood”, Linklater’s great film from a few years ago: there too, time wrote the script, depicting growth as the actors genuinely aged before our very eyes. “FOMO” is a “Boyhood” condensed into a single year and multiplied by an entire class. Adults are hardly ever seen. Teachers remain in the background, necessary extras; parents make few appearances, mostly in the form of notifications on mobile phones. This is not that Italian film with Silvio Orlando as the headteacher, Claudio Bisio as the caretaker, Anna Foglietta as the teacher and the usual line-up of youngsters who are brilliant at playing kids, but who are already overacting – and here, too, lies a small act of revenge by RaiPlay, as with “Mare Fuori”, programmes better attuned to the “teen universe” than Italian cinema. The young people in “FOMO”, on the other hand, aren’t acting and yet they’re always acting. Just like anyone who’s grown up surrounded by reality TV and social media: they know they’re in front of a camera and yet, at the very same moment, they forget it, because they were born with a screen in their hands. That’s the trick – the one that few scriptwriters know how to capture.