Gomorrah
"Gomorra" is an inside look at Italy's modern-day crime families a contemporary Neapolitan mob drama that exposes Italy's
criminal underbelly by telling five stories of individuals who think
they can make their own compact with Camorra, the area's Mafia.
Brutal and unrelenting, this documentary-style expose of the Camorra --
the Naples equivalent of the Sicilian mafia -- burns away all hints of
Hollywood glamour and leaves in its place a depressingly grim portrayal
of entrenched corruption as not just merely endemic to Italian (and
international) business and culture, but perhaps even essential as a
wheel-greasing mechanism. Director Matteo Garrone -- working from a
nonfiction book by journalist Roberto Saviano that garnered the writer
death threats from the Camorra -- unsentimentally throws us into five
different stories of the murderous shadow the organization casts over
the lives of ordinary people, from youngsters who want in because,
ironically, they’ve bought into the Scarface sheen to honest
businessfolk who cannot escape the Camorra’s grasp, and spares us none
of the violence, greed, recklessness, or soullessness of these people
for whom “criminal” seems too kind a term. Italy’s official submission
to the Best Foreign Language Film category at the most recent Academy
Awards and winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes in 2008, this is a film
for only the most passionate of film fans. There is nothing redemptive
here, nothing uplifting or hopeful, and it will try the indulgence of
even the most generous seeker of stories with its refusal to pander to
our instinct for satisfying narrative. It’s not that there aren’t
rewards here, but they are cold and bleak.
Great films change the way we think about cinema. A masterpiece can alter our
perception of life. Matteo Garrone’s startling film, Gomorrah,
about the criminal underworld in Naples, is one of these rare movies. The
title is a biblical pun on the Comor-ra gangs who run the city’s sink
estates like private businesses. It’s a gripping fiction about the appalling
damage they cause. The opening sequence is a sardonic nod to the classic
Mafia murder. A group of tattooed men are topping up their tans in a grubby
solarium. The screen is a toxic glow of ultraviolet.
The Friday banter comes to a grisly halt when a smiling thug fishes a gun from
behind his back and shoots his half-naked friends at point-blank range. We
are not privy to the reasons for this. The perplexing lack of narrative
turns every unpredictable killing into a squalid waste of life.
Garrone’s film is brave to the point of foolhardy. Gomorrah is a
lacerating account of the real Camorra, the mindless violence, and the slums
where they breed. Garrone delivers a sledgehammer blow to the Godfather
fantasy. He shatters the Hollywood myth and exposes the godforsaken reality.
The only “tradition” celebrated here is callous indifference.
The documentary intensity of Gomorrah is a tabloid scandal. The
crumbling estates of Scam-pia are home to families whose lives are
determined by overweight skinheads in cheap track-suits. The crowded flats
are incongruously stacked up in the shape of ocean liners beached next to
eight-lane highways in the middle of baking nowhere. The concrete gangplanks
are patrolled by seedy drug-dealers.
The film stalks a handful of vulnerable locals. Totò is an androgynous
13-year-old who is desperate to sign up to a gang, even if the initiation
ceremony involves being shot in the chest. Two pimply Scarface fans,
Marco and Ciro, steal guns from the wrong crew. And a sleazy flake, Franco,
mints a fortune by tucking away lorry-loads of chemicals in local quarries.
The brilliant cast are a terrifying mix of professional actors and hand-picked
locals. The unpredictable narrative is far more in tune with the favelas in City
of God than Scorsese’s Mean Streets. In some respects Gomorrah
marks a parting of the ways. This bleak portrait of human waste has
little chance of paddling across the Atlantic. Roberto Saviano, the young
Italian journalist who wrote the book on which the film is based, has paid a
high price for this authenticity. He is now living with police protection.
