Gomorrah

Synopsis: An account of everyday life in Camorra-ruled Naples

The publicists for the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes 2008 have chosen to foreground the claim from the LA Daily News that Gomorrah is “the best Italian mob movie since The Godfather”. This choice of quote may well work against them since Matteo Garrone’s film bears little resemblance to Coppola’s 70s classic. Whereas that film was a highly polished, star-driven Hollywood studio effort that unreservedly romanticised the Mafia, Gomorrah is much closer to the realist tradition of European cinema and has nothing even remotely good to say about the Camorra. Both are works of fiction but whereas the former skilfully worked the mechanics of plot, pacing and character to produce engaging entertainment, the latter is dramatically “flat” with no concession to an audience’s expectation for narrative development, vicarious thrills or visual pleasure.

Gomorrah initially appears to be one of those films which lay out characters whose stories will be come enmeshed in a narrative bird’s eye view. Probably about half-way through one realizes that this is not going to happen and in fact these are discrete threads which are only held together by the commonality of their milieu. Thus we have a couple of gun-happy punks, a “businessman” who discreetly removes toxic waste, an overworked tailor doing knock-offs of haute couture, a kid who aspire to be a clan member, and an accountant who delivers weekly pay packets to the families of jailed or murdered clan lackeys, all symptomatic elements of the underbelly of Neapolitan society. There is no narrative integration or even much in the way of character development in what is bordering on being a “re-creative” documentation (the film was based on a best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, who went undercover and used informants to create his account of this world).

The problem with having to sit through 136 minutes of this is that the subjects depicted are an unpalatable rag-tag of hoons, goons and sharks. Without Hollywood gloss, or the kind of charming characterisations of, say, Fernando Meirelles’ Cidade De Deus (2002), which dealt with similar material in Rio’s favelas, the reality of their brutal lives is not even remotely interesting. Humanity at its basest is sordid and frankly tedious. Yes, the relative candour of Gomorrah is an commendable antidote to Hollywood’s romanticisation of thuggery and murder (aside from winning the Grand Prix at Cannes it has been a box office hit in Europe) but whether one needs to see this film in order to realize that the former, no matter how entertaining, is pure tosh is another matter.

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