Cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Gianfelice Imparato, Maria Nazionale

Director: Matteo Garrone

Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci

Running time: 2 hr 15 mins

Genre: Foreign Film



CRITIQUE:


Matteo Garrone’s Italian cinematic oeuvre is a remorseless one. This gritty, unflinching look into the brutal streets of Naples sings no sonata to the Hollywood gangster opera that the world has been familiar of. The blood-drenched viciousness of Gomorra makes The Godfather saga look like a musical. From its opening, an ultraviolet-filtered scene in a tanning shop, we downrightly see people being shot, and enters a rather Godardian title template – it sets the scene for what is about to come, bold and uncannily real. Here there are no black-suited, sharp-looking men, or patriarchal figures in white tuxedos lounging around mansions whilst stylised crimes flit beyond its walls, whilst in Gomorra there are only grubby-looking people, youngsters in the streets, morally-corrupt locals, all walking around the decaying urbanity of Italy. Romanticism is shredded off, and it shows an unruly core via cinema verité.


For all its entire swathe of violence and realism, it’s easy to see why critics esteem this cinematic work; it takes its camera into the role of a watcher, where we see no heroes but everyday characters, a thirteen-year-old boy corrupted into social obligation, two Tony-Montana-wannabe renegades who steal weapons for personal gains, and a tailor in his fabric industry. These are vignettes of life pushed to the brink in a society where guns and drugs are basic as food, and human carnage serves as dessert. That at the back of these is a sprawling underworld organisation that infiltrates almost every aspect of Italian life, and more shockingly, the world. From the trade industry down to the local shops, and even the fashion world; Garrone succinctly shows a television reel of Scarlett Johansson in the red carpet in Venice Film Festival wearing a ‘cream’ dress, whose fabric’s making had gone through bloodshed and claiming of lives. It’s a terrifying scenario, almost to the point of documentary. Where the film succeeds as an incredible, unabashed portrait of Naples, it somehow lacks a sense of narrative, the camera leaping from one storyline strand to another. Audience are merely watching snippets of daily life that adds to a bigger, coherent whole. For a film whose source author has now been living in hiding, dodging threats from the crime organisation Comorra, it takes bravery to make this piece of cinema.


VERDICT:

An acrid, horrifying look into the gun-and-gangster culture in the heart of Italy, Gomorra ruthlessly strips any sentimentality, romanticism, and optimism in this bleak, uninvolving at times, but blistering cinema, one of 2008’s bests.



RATING: A-