Loading ...Screen Daily - Probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy, Gomorrah is a courageous, bruising and harrrowing ride. But the film suffers from its own bravery: in adapting Roberto Saviano’s bestselling book for the screen, Matteo Garrone and his five co-scripters (including Saviano himself, currently living under police protection) have jettisoned the journalistic context of the Neapolitan Camorra war and left us only with the dog-eat-dog, carpe-diem chaos of life in the crime-ridden suburbs of Scampia and Secondigliano. Like the white powder used and traded by many of its protagonists, Gomorrah provides a kick-in-the-head rush but no lasting buzz.
It’s still a powerful statement, though, with impressive performances from both actors and non-professionals in the ensemble cast, and an edgy visual style that channels the nervousness and unpredictability of life in a Camorra stronghold. And it’s also a solid commercial prospect that will hitch a ride from the widespread publication of Saviano’s book (42 countries and counting) but also go the distance thanks to its own undoubted visual (and aural) impact. Fandango Portobello has already sold the film in seven territories, including the UK, France, and Germany/Austria, and more are likely before Cannes wraps. The film was released in Italy (with its heavy Neapolitan dialect subtitled in Italian) two days before its Cannes debut on a wide 400 screens, and though official weekend figures are not yet in, audience numbers are reported to be buoyant on the back of overwhelmingly positive reviews.
The film’s disorienting structure and lack of context are clearly deliberate: only at the end are we given a few captions explaining, among other things, that the Neapolitan Camorra is a huge economic powerhouse which has even invested in the reconstruction of New York’s Twin Towers. Ironically, on the day of the film’s Cannes debut, Italian newspapers were dominated by two stories – one the ongoing refuse crisis in Naples (the Camorra-controlled waste disposal industry is one of Gomorrah’s principal themes), the other the arrest of Guido Abbinante, head of the ’seccesionists’, whose savage, no-holds-barred war against the rival Di Lauro clan is the film’s main focus… [Full Story]
