NYFF. Gomorrah.

"Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah [site] is the latest in a long line of hyperlink films, like Syriana and Babel, that employ multiple storylines to weave a massive, web-like plot meant to illustrate a complex socio-political issue," writes Timothy Sun at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "In this case, it is the Camorra, Naples’ omnipotent, omnipresent organized crime ring. Garrone’s neorealist, nearly journalistic indictment of this societal cancer follows five different story strands whose only connective tissue is the fact that all of the characters, willingly or not, are controlled by the Camorra." And while he finds the film "brave and sincere, rigorous in its anti-Hollywood, down-and-dirty aesthetic, full of sound and plenty of fury," he nevertheless explains, too, why "a series like The Wire is profound in ways that Gomorrah is not."

Updated through 10/13.

"David Simon has apparently ruined life for everyone because this is the second film in NYFF's line-up (though the complaints date back to Cannes) to be compared, unfavorably, to The Wire," notes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "The complaint is roughly of the same nature in both cases (the other being Laurent Cantet's The Class): too much ground to cover, not enough time to cover it, better explored on the show.... The problem with Gomorrah is that it could start and end anywhere.

"Roberto Saviano, the young journalist and author of the bestselling book on which this film is based, did his research among gangs of illegal workers - on the docks, in the clandestine clothing factories, dealing drugs in the piazza - and their fight for survival is the real story in this shocking portrait of life under the Naples criminal sistema (system)." Claire Longrigg reports 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."

"Garrone's gangster-as-capitalist view never softens its focus a la Traffic or turn its executions into exploitative set pieces a la City of God; lean and coolly distanced despite the plot's escalating violence, the film at its most fierce feels like a continuation of Francesco Rosi's caustic exposés like Lucky Luciano and Illustrious Corpses." Fernando F Croce in Slant: "Expertly controlled for most of its sprawling running time, the film's points about life under ruthless criminal rule grow inexorably redundant, particularly as, in an attempt at connecting the dots in Garrone's massive canvas, it gives in to the stock mobster shocks it had rigorously eschewed. Still, few mafia films so thoroughly depict an order in which crime is to its people not an underworld but, simply and bleakly, the world itself."

"There's no Don Corleone here, no Family to pin," notes John Magary in the Reeler. "There's just terminal disease.... So, it makes that point. But - and this has been the case with more than a few films at this year's Festival, Che immediately coming to mind - it doesn't strain to do much else. To walk away from such a sensitively observed film - all 135 minutes of it - thinking only, 'Shit, Naples is really fucked,' you can't help but feel a little cheated."

"The mafia: Is there any other organization, legal or illegal, that's so benefited from the mythologizing power of the cinema?" asks Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot. "While engaging with such subject matter invites de facto vicarious thrills Italian director Matteo Garrone can never entirely shake - even in the post-Sopranos era he's still dealing with a semi-hidden world that provokes wonder and fascination no matter the attempts to divest its players of the untouchable aura of outlaw beatification - he goes as far possible into the realm of the mafia's unfeeling ruthlessness in his latest film, Gomorrah, without tripping over sentimentality or stylization."

"Garrone seeks not to explore the roots of why a culture exists, how such violence can be stopped, or even why a life of crime is so attractive to the young - his modest goal is simply to make this culture apparent to the rest of the world," writes Landon Palmer in cinemattraction. "The result is shocking, revealing, and raises many questions, but its lack of depth may unfortunately prevent much of what's been seen to resonate long after you've left the theater."

"Examination of the history of the world of crime, at least as represented in cinema, brings us to a number of basic conclusions: There is elegance where there is violence and danger, and there is heartbreak beyond that elegance." Evan Louison in the Cinema Echo Chamber.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update: Film Comment's Evan Davis: "'I haven't seen hope for people in that territory,' Garrone lamented. 'There are good people... not conscious about the decisions they make. I have hope for the conscience of the people who live there. [But because] the Camorra is in place of the government, all is confused, bad and good.' The one glimmer of hope Garrone possibly sees for these rural areas outside Naples is in education. 'They are beginning to solve the problem of education, [which can begin] change between the individual and institutions.' But, with a distinct air of heaviness in his voice, Garrone concluded, 'we will see.'"

Updates, 10/8: "Garrone's film appears to have been well received by the mobsters whose thuggery it highlights," notes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "'The risk was taken by Saviano,' Garrone tells me. 'The film takes a different direction from the book. It is not a journalistic denunciation. There wasn't that much hostility from the Camorra when we were filming. It was the other way round. I really had the feeling that they wanted to participate in the project. These people obviously have a great fascination with cinema!'"

Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Garrone.

---

Updates, 10/9: From David D'Arcy...

Gomorrah is now a hit in Italy, although director Matteo Garrone says there are critics of the film, who all seem to work for the Naples Department of Tourism. Their fear, the director says, is that tourists will be discouraged from visiting the city after they see the film of interwoven stories in which Neapolitans (residents of the industrial suburbs, actually) are seen robbing, looting, murdering, selling drugs and illegally dumping toxic waste.

Perhaps the tourist officials have a point, but in seeing the film for the third time at the New York Film Festival, I was struck by Garrone's use of monumentality to construct powerful visual metaphors. This is Italy, after all, where elected officials condemn the looting of antiquities (by museums and collectors) by saying that the cultural relics of the past are the country's only "natural" resources.

Much of the action takes place in Scampia, a suburb northwest of Naples built as a bedroom community in the 1960s, to which thousands of impoverished earthquake victims were sent in 1980. 25 years later, and the area has high levels of drug addiction and crime, as you might imagine. These are the kinds of places where the Neapolitan equivalent of wise guys are hired from the armies of the unemployed, and where the mob sells its drugs to the younger generation.

But the building itself where Garrone shot tells much of the story. The pyramidal structure looks like something conceived as visionary architecture in the 1950s or 1960s, a self-contained steel-clad ship of a building - an homage to Naples maritime culture? - where hundreds of families live without services or stores. Rusting and rotting, the place seems to have been decaying for decades. Think of Babylon, Piranesi and a Russian science fiction film. After being deposited there by the government and then abandoned, the residents and the mob have remade it according to their needs - a kind of kleptopolis or mob-opolis, literally oozing with crime.

The other striking metaphor is that of a cavernous quarry, in which a businessman whose trade is cut-rate dumping piles in hundreds of drums of toxic waste. Discount disposal of noxious chemicals ensures that local businesses can convert what would have been costs into profits, a reasonable business calculation. When the illegal African workers carrying out the illegal operation figure out what they're handling and walk off the job, the executive rounds up local children to drive the trucks, and the work moves ahead. Where there once was the kind of marble from which sculpture and palaces were made is now chemical waste, all to be covered with dirt. To keep the job dirt-cheap, child labor is used. It's rare that cynicism has been so magnificently crystallized.

There's another scene that Garrone wanted in the film, but eventually left out: Roberto Saviano's book, on which the film is based, opens with the image of frozen Chinese corpses being dumped into the sea in the industrial port of Naples, the same port into which Chinese goods enter Europe and travel throughout that continent. There are quotas on the number of Chinese immigrants who can enter Italy, so the criminal rings that bring them into the country arrange for dead bodies to be thrown into the water, so that other immigrants can take the identities of the dead. Souls for sale? Everything else is in this vision of Italy, a place which sent immigrants all over the world and which now relies on illegal African and Chinese workers for its goods to compete on the global market. Think of Gomorrah as a expansion of the immigrant theme of Gianni Amelio's Lamerica.

Saviano wrote the screenplay for Gomorrah, and in this case, the film is a legitimate work in its own right, and not just a compression of the book to extend the value of the brand. Saviano views the players from a distance in his mournful reporting, as if the damage has already been done - he is said to have gotten police protection after his book became an Italian bestseller. We all know how effective the police have been in reducing the scope of the Camorra's power. The book is less a narrative than an observation.

In his screenplay, however, Saviano has constructed multiple narratives, each of which is driven by a character or a group of characters - that is, driven to the extent to which a person shaped by circumstances can be viewed to be the master of his own fate. If Saviano the observer and self-designated mourner is the first-person voice in his book, he has succeeded on film in transferring that voice into characters whose lives are lived within the maze of crime. The film, hot with intrigue, testosterone, greed and ambition and tells the stories that have ended by the time you encounter them in the coldly analytical book.

Since Gomorrah screened for press at the NYFF, I've heard criticisms that it is a retread of parallel-story TV dramas like The Wire, or of multi-layered crime films like Traffic. I'm not convinced. Garrone, who was his own cameraman, says his influence was Roberto Rossellini's Paisan, which told stories in sequence set at the end of World War II, including one about a black US GI who learns to his chagrin that local people who have survived the fighting are living in caves. Garrone's film (which played in Italy with subtitles because the suburban dialect was so hard to understand) is grander and too metaphorical to be confused with an application of a TV style. There is an American feel to the camera movement, but it's as assimilated to the Italian setting as the rap music the teenage gangsters play.

- David D'Arcy

---

Online viewing tip. The Guardian's Xan Brooks posts a three-minute video review.

James Mottram talks with Garrone for the London Times.

Updates, 10/10: Garrone has "a documentarist's eye for the authentic, both for people or places, and a dramatist's urge for the tragic and the universal," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out. "Such is the speed of the storytelling and its complexity that relationships and events are sometimes as muddled as our understanding of them, yet that's the welcome price of rejecting over-simplification and distortion."

"The movie omits that part of Roberto Saviano's book which deals with the camorra's link with Britain," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "But it certainly leaves us pondering the fact that we British, and all EU members, donate the money and the political respectability which serves to cover up the whole dysfunctional business. Gomorrah is a powerful example of that thrilling current of energy which right now is lighting up Italian cinema."

"Our brains have become so adept at piecing together fragmented narratives in everything from Hana-bi and Crash to Reservoir Dogs and Babel, that it is disorienting to discover that the storylines in Gomorrah are linked only thematically, and don't require any home assembly," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "The younger characters are all burrowing their way into Mob business, while the old hands come a cropper in the uncertain climate. Few of the characters emerge untainted - unlike Garrone, whose appalled analysis shares with The Sopranos an aversion to bloodlust. This year's Cannes jury awarded the film the Grand Prix, and anyone who sees it will be likely to agree."

"It's a tough film because it's such an uncompromising one - there's a danger that Garrone pushes the grim determinism too far, even," suggests Tim Robey in the Telegraph. "But his prowling observational technique makes it pungent and frightening in scene after scene, an entry-pass to some obscure circle of hell. All in all, not an easy night out, but not an easy one to forget, either."

Update, 10/13: If Gomorrah "does pick up any Academy Awards, its director, Matteo Garrone, may be without a cast member or two to cheer him on," reports Tom Kington in the Guardian. "Since the movie opened in Italy, two have been arrested and a third is being investigated over allegations of real-life mafia involvement."

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2008 6:21 AM