Review: Gomorrah (4.5/5)

Gomorrah
(Matteo Garrone):

Salvatore Abruzzese, Toni Servillo, Carmine Paternoster, Marco Macor, Circo Petrone,
Salvatore Cantalupo, Carlo Del Sorbo.
Running time: 137 minutes. (16)

Things were a lot tougher back in the Old Testament. If vice got the better of you in Gomorrah, you were met with a pyroclastic surge of fire and brimstone. But in Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, a multi-narrative film set in modern-day Napoli, there is no god to arrest the fall of man. And the Italian authorities don't bother either – the police only ever enter to mop up a mess. Yet this is a place awash with sin and corruption, a Gomorrah in everything but name. It's the true-to-life world of the Camorra, the sprawling network of gangster families that control parts of Napoli and whose tentacles reach far into Italy. This is a world unto itself. Society is sinking faster than a barrel of lead. It's set around a warren apartment complex, a place where teenagers carry guns and rob African cocaine dealers; where families snuff each other out in daily feuds; where women are shot in the head because they come from the wrong family; where state contracts go to men who dump toxic waste in the countryside. The only law here is loyalty to your clan.

The opening sequence lets you know what you're in for: preening gangsters luxuriate in a tanning booth when suddenly, their own associates draw guns and shoot them down. Here violence is used as a tool to shock rather than to excite. Executions burst onto the screen like an unexpected punch to the head. It leaves you reeling.

The story evolves over five threads, taking in six characters whose lives are helplessly consumed. There's Totó (Salvatore Abruzzese), an unblinking pre-teen who watches killings and drug-dealing daily. He is going to be sucked in with the inevitability of quicksand. At one point, he lines up with other boys who await their turn to enter an old warehouse. There, a man swamps their tiny shoulders with a bullet-proof vest and shoots them in the chest. "Now you're a man," he tells each of them.

Don Ciro (Carlo Del Sorbo) is a grey, middle-aged moneyman who shuffles from apartment to apartment paying out mob cash to loyal families whose sons and daughters are in jail. But feuding ruptures his clan and he is caught in the middle. There's Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a quiet tailor who works in virtual poverty despite overseeing the factory production of haute couture for the European markets. In desperation, he accepts money to teach workers at a clandestine Chinese factory. He rides there in the boot of a car as he will be shot for disloyalty if he is found out. There's Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a young man who finds work with the smooth, silver-haired Franco (Toni Servillo). He thinks it's an honest job but Franco is as toxic as the waste he buys up from Italian firms and then dumps illegally in any place he can hide it. At one point, his truck drivers quit after one of them is burned by leaking waste. Franco then hires kid drivers instead.

The film's apogee of madness resides, however, in Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), a pair of coke-addled gun-toting livewires who think life is a gangster movie. "I'm No 1, Tony Montana," says Marco, whose hero is Al Pacino's Scarface. They uncover a stash of mob weapons, which leads to a classic scene where, on a wintry beach, they stand in their underpants firing guns into the sea. Their robbing spree incurs the wrath of a local Don.

Hollywood could glamorise gangsters because it knew they had to get comeuppance. Social order was restored. But in Garrone's universe, there is no such thing as comeuppance. And the social order no longer exists. There's just a daily cycle of violence. He captures this with an almost journalistic honesty. Gomorrah is very much in the Italian neo-realist tradition, using real locations and mainly non-actors to tell a raw, truthful story. But Garrone builds on top the multi-strand perspective of American films such as Traffic and Babel, giving us a dizzy gallery of characters and ever-shifting, nosing perspectives. This comes at a price though: you cannot but feel a little detachment for its characters.

Garrone views his subject matter with a dispassionate, roaming eye. His camera is always searching out and contrasting daily life: there is a scene where you watch a drug deal right above a pair of newly-weds making their procession. It's a tough, angry, unrelenting film, a dazzling socio-economic portrait of a country devastated by mafia corruption. The point is hammered home in the final scene, in which middle-aged men stand on a beach, guns in hand, while a dump truck goes to work with the crumpled bodies of Italy's youth inside. (October 12, 2008)