Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 137 minutes. Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone).
Last Thursday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing Gomorrah, director Matteo Garrone’s sixth feature film and winner of the Grand Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It plunges viewers directly into the vicious lives of the Neapolitan mafia (the Camorra) as they unfold in and around an oversize, crumbling modernist apartment block. The Camorra, with its tentacles reaching into in every aspect of Naples’s social and economic life, exerts a gravitational pull on the several youths whose stories Garrone chronicles—among them Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), who delivers groceries for his mother’s market before being initiated into one faction of the underworld, and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor), teens who hope to turn their petty crimes into an independent fiefdom of their own. (Interestingly, at several points in the film Marco acts out scenes from Scarface, evidence that cinematic myths are now inextricably entwined with the figures’ hard-knock lives.) As if to emphasize how encompassing the Camorra really is, the film also focuses on the elderly Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), a longtime payoff delivery man who is distraught by the nameless centrifugal forces pulling apart his world.
The story was adapted by a handful of sreenwriters from Roberto Saviano’s journalistic exposé of the same name, which received much attention when it was published, first in Italy (causing Saviano to go into hiding) and then in English. Perhaps because of this multi-author adaptation, narrative clarity is difficult to come by in the film: one never truly understands which factions are battling and why, who is in charge of the cocaine trade that underpins much of the activity, or how these groups interact with that (perhaps narrow) slice of the population not directly involved with illegal activities. Perhaps this can be seen as paralleling the chaotic jumble of shifting alliances that marks the characters’ lives. It took a while to adjust to the lack of broader context, but the two-and-a-quarter-hour film more than makes up in excitement and visual beauty for what it lacks in narrative cohesion. (A favorite shot, one of the few to offer a broader perspective on the film’s relentless violent assault, depicts youths playing in a small plastic swimming pool on a balcony while thugs patrol the rooftop just above them.)
GreenCine Daily has two posts with roundups from Cannes and the New York Film Festival. One of the critical comments, by John Magary, sums up my feelings about the film fairly well: “There’s no Don Corleone here, no Family to pin. There’s just terminal disease.” From a piece in The Guardian: “In casting his film, Garrone made a point of using local people as extras, adding an unpolished intensity to his documentary-style camerawork. We are always uncomfortably close to the action, like another member of the crowd; in the dimly lit corridors and cramped kitchens, we are not granted the privilege of seeing what’s about to happen. Garrone said he wanted to film Gomorrah like a war report, because that is, essentially, what it is.” Click here for the trailer. It opens in New York at the IFC Center in February.
Tags: Gomorrah, IFC Center, Italian film, Matteo Garrone
