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Derek Malcolm's rating
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Dir: Matteo Garrone.
Cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Fabricino, Vincenzo Altamura, Italo Renda
Description: Brutal yet compelling portrait of life in suburban Naples, where a local mob called the Camorra uses fear and violence to exert a choking hold over the locals. Adapted from Roberto Saviano's bestseller, the film interweaves several plot strands, concentrating in part on a lowly tailor who discovers that hoping for better can sometimes get you killed, and two trigger-happy youths who try to break into the big league but realise too late that they are out of their depth.
Country: ITA. 2008. 137mins
Inside dope: drug dealing is one of the Camorra's main sources of income
Ruthless efficiency: the Camorra is estimated to have killed more than 10,000 people
A man steps into a tanning cubicle and stands naked as the tubes flicker on. Moments later, another man goes into the booth and shoots him through the head. The opening scene of Matteo Garrone’s film is remarkable, abruptly frightening. But this is not just another crime thriller, to be enjoyed, like The Godfather, by the Mafia themselves.
Instead, it is about the Neapolitan Camorra, responsible for such large-scale corruption that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been encouraged to marshal troops in the city in an attempt to clean up the corruption.
It is based on a best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, who is still living under carabinieri protection after its publication in 2006. Judging by what we see in Gomorrah, he is a brave man.
The film, partly written by Saviano, and winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes (one lower than the Palme d’Or), adopts a fluent, cinéma vérité style as it examines the lives of the families living in an apartment building in Casal di Principe, a suburb at the centre of the Camorra’s activities.
These crooks are shrewd and prepared to make life easier for those who either co-operate with them or leave them to get on with their profitable business. The money they dish out for those in trouble is nothing to the vast amounts they collect every week. And those who commit sins against them are disposed of with a wholly dispassionate efficiency and zeal.
Despite its first sequence, Gomorrah is neither particularly bloody nor overtly spectacular. That’s not the Camorra’s way, and it isn’t Garrone’s either. Everything the Camorra does is done with as little fuss as possible, as it ought to be in a highly profitable business. And the film has a matter-of-fact tone that corresponds with that.
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Garrone looks at the small fry who either want out or want in. There’s a veteran tailor, Pasquale (the excellent Salvatore Cantalopo), who surreptitiously sells fashion secrets to competing Chinese immigrants despite working for the Camorra and somehow survives an ambush in a cemetery. He turns to driving a lorry rather than risk himself and his family again.
There are two stupid teenagers (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) who fancy themselves as Al Pacino in Scarface and are suspected of stealing arms from a secret gang cache. They are easily dispensed with following a businesslike Camorra meeting. And there is university graduate Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), assistant to Franco (Tony Servillo), who sees the terrible effects of illegally buried toxins on land where fruit is grown and hears his boss tell the strikers who object: “Go make pizzas.”
The Camorra, the film states with its final captions, generates an annual £150 billion and has claimed 10,000 lives over the past three decades. The enforcers are everywhere, listening to complaints, handing over hush money and doing the necessary if threats are not enough. Murders are committed, sometimes almost regretfully, because “it has to be done”. Mostly, the police are nowhere to be seen.
Garrone’s powerful film is sometimes difficult to follow because it casts its net so wide and wriggles its way into the lives of so many people. But its worn and grubby locations and its grainy, dramatic camerawork present us with a world under siege, full of characters who look less like actors and more like ordinary human beings involved in turf wars, alliances and betrayals — whether they like it or not.
This may not be a perfect movie but it is memorable, angry at what it finds but determined not to produce either lily-white heroes or colourful villains.
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