Gomorra

Matteo Garrone (2008)

The title is a pun, unavoidably lost in translation:  the Camorra is a Mafia-like criminal organisation, centred on Naples, and the film is based on a non-fiction exposé of the Camorra by Roberto Saviano.  The film-makers seem to have calculated, not unreasonably, that a documentary screen version would be impracticable, whereas a dramatised adaptation would have real and international commercial prospects – as an Italian film, treating in an unglamorous way, one of the country’s most enduringly successful exports, especially to Hollywood.  The documentary elements are remarkable, at least initially.   For a British cinema audience anyway, our awareness of overseas organised crime culture is overwhelmingly through an American perspective, mostly in period settings.  Watching a film set in bleak tower blocks and areas of waste land in poor Southern Italy is a novel experience – and the larger context is very much present day.  The events take place in an economically and ethnically diversified Europe;  the main features of the plot include dumping of toxic waste and interactions between indigenous manufacturing industry and a local Chinese work force.

But Gomorrah fails as drama:  although the five stories which it comprises are derived from Saviano’s book, they’ve not – for all the many names on the screenplay credit – been developed convincingly so that they feel like artificial constructions, each one representing a different aspect of the malign magnetism of the Camorra.  An innocent-looking early adolescent has to betray his neighbour out of allegiance to the gangsters.  Two older boys – late teens or early twenties – are wannabe Mafiosi.  A better-educated contemporary eventually walks out on his criminal employer and walks away from camera, having saved his soul but ruined his career prospects (‘Have fun making pizzas’, his boss mutters derisively after him).  A middle-aged man, who’s been collecting money for his bosses for years, is shocked out of his craven routines by the violence exploding around him.  The two aspirant gangsters are at the heart of the film and they, in particular, seem a contrivance.  In their early scenes, they act out being Tony Montana in Scarface but this fantasy seems a flashy distraction from the shocking point that Gomorrah seems to be making – that, in such an economically deprived area, the Camorra is not just the main local employer but the best bet in terms of a steady job:  young males don’t need to be dreaming of being Al Pacino to get mixed up in it.   (It’s not clear whether the fact that one of these two boys speaks in a hoarse voice that reminds you of Robert De Niro’s as the young Vito Corleone is ironic or accidental.)  After the boys steal a cache of guns from the Camorra, they go to a lake for manic target practice with their new toys, shooting into and across the water.  It’s a striking sequence – but no more than striking because the characters don’t mean enough to you as individuals.  Their roles are sketchily written – perhaps as a result, the actors sometimes seem to be working themselves into spasms of intensity that lack the underpinning of clear characterisation.   (The frequent hand-held camera work, in a similar way, can tend to seem arbitrarily urgent.) Although the boys’ eventual fate succeeds in coming over as inevitable rather than predictable, it’s done in a way that makes it seem no more than a pale imitation of the end of Los Olvidados.

The best part of the film concerns Pasquale, the tailor who is selling his trade secrets to the Chinese rag trade.  His life and motivation have a texture and an ambivalence that Gomorrah elsewhere lacks; and Salvatore Cantalupo, who plays Pasquale, gives the most nuanced and felt performance in the film. Gomorrah ends with a lot of text – presenting the grim statistics associated with the Camorra (numbers of deaths, volume of drugs trade etc) – to be read from the screen.  This wordy epilogue – and the fact that the figures make a stronger impression than much of what’s preceded them on screen – makes you wonder if this isn’t an admission of failure to dramatise the material.   The film has its kinetic highlights:  the opening blue-lit shoot-up in a solarium; the attack on the car carrying the Chinese and Pasquale, which crashes to a halt into a yard filled with classical European statuary, parts of which are smashed in the impact.  Yet it can’t deliver these moments without following the conventions of the popular film genre to which it belongs but which it seems to be trying elsewhere to transcend.

12 October 2008