Film: Gomorrah
Release date: 9th February 2009
Certificate: 15
Running time: 132 mins
Director: Matteo Garrone
Starring: Salvatore Abruzzese, Salvatore Striano, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino, Carlo Del Sorbo
Genre: Crime/Drama
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Italy
In the vast majority of mafia movies, the glitz and glamour are the focus, with only occasional outbursts of violence reminding the viewer it is a story about murderers. Not so in Gomorrah.
Set in a Neopolitan slum, the film connects five stories centring on the criminal activities of warring factions of the Camorra, the area’s Mafioso organisation. These stories are woven together to depict an Italy seldom seen in cinema; one of poverty and drug abuse where murder is a daily occurrence and life is bleak…
Matteo Garrone’s tale of interconnected lives on a Naples housing estate, and the local crime syndicate in whose grip the residents live, has inevitably been compared with City Of God (Cidade de Deus). Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s 2002 film landed a heavy punch of shocking violence mixed with honest humour as the stories of the inhabitants of the titular Rio de Janeiro favela unravelled. Gomorrah (Gomorra), based on Roberto Saviano’s expose of the Naples mafia, has a similar subject matter and violent streak but is stripped of the warmth of comedy.
Touches of humanity are well played thanks to unobtrusive direction allowing the script and subtle performances to bring characters to life in very little screen time.
Real praise goes to the editing; the interconnecting tales are deftly cut together, juxtaposing scenes well and delivering a considerable amount of narrative without losing the consistently gentle pace, which serves to make the violence and terror seem routine.
Colour is washed from the film with director of photography Marco Onorato capturing the dilapidated houses and barren countryside of the industrial area well. The spots of colour which remain appear as oases in this crumbling desert and are a glimpse at how life could have been. A fleeting shot of children playing in a roof-top swimming pool on the housing estate is one example.
The soundtrack is largely ambient sound adding to the realism and helping to disguise the artifice involved in fictionalising non-fiction, something the film as whole succeeds in.
In a film of good performances those of Gianfelice Imparato and Salvatore Cantalupo stand out. Imparato’s Don Ciro is the money man whose job is to deliver handouts to those on the estate loyal to one of the opposing factions. As the situation becomes worse Ciro’s mounting anxiety as he questions his work is palpable and creates a series of tense scenes.
Cantalupo’s counterfeit tailor is a gentle artisan who appears caught up in crime simply as means of doing what he loves, and the scenes in which he teaches his art play as an innocent dream in a nightmare reality.
The darkness of Gomorrah is not entirely without light and the writers (Saviano and Garrone are joined by Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio and Massimo Gaudioso on the screenplay credits) give hope in the figures of two youngsters. The choices of Totò, a boy in his early teens played by Salvatore Abruzzese, as he takes his first steps into the criminal underworld draw the viewer in, quickly becoming emotionally involved in the consequences. Despite the absence of any glamour in this gangster tale, Toto’s eagerness to join a gang is matched by many of his contemporaries, alarming numbers of whom stand in line to be shot at in an initiation. Elsewhere, Carmine Paternoster plays a young man beginning an apprenticeship in waste disposal, and the cruel reality of the legitimate business into which he has walked challenges his principles. His internal struggle brings a welcome dash of morality.
Garrone plays with the overdone subject matter of the mob; cleverly referencing the Hollywood image of gangsters with the story of two youths trying to make their mark on the underworld, dreaming of being Scarface’s Tony Montoya. The film follows the youths as they seek elevation above petty crime and to establish themselves as serious underworld players. Deluded by ignorance and naivety, the pair engender sympathy despite their criminal intentions.
Like their story, the connected narratives are largely told from outside the established Camorra, focusing on the periphery. The five stories reveal only scattered jigsaw pieces of this vast criminal organisation but the film is not really about the gangsters, rather what is communicated with frightening clarity is how human life is brutalised by their merciless pursuit of power and profit.
Saviano’s book resulted in several threats to his life and this adaptation, not only wonderfully filmed, tells his story with the same righteous bravery, and the result is startling. GRANT
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