MORE than anything else, Gomorra has time or at least terrific topicality on its side, so that its depiction of a mafia-plagued city feels like a wider comment on a moribund state. Italy's political figures have a decadent murkiness that makes the Bo
rgias look like the Waltons; its national airline, Alitalia, has been haemorrhaging £500,000 a day; and Naples is a city choked both by toxic waste and crime that has become woven into its social fabric.
Gomorra is Italian for Gomorrah, the Biblical sister of Sodom but, of course, the title is a play on the name of the Naples crime syndicate, the Camorra. Inspired by a best-selling journalistic exposé by Robert Saviano, who now requires police protection following death threats, this engrossing film shapes a social essay out of five stories which co-exist, rather than connect, and illustrate the Camorra's grip on Naples. In this city, the local Mafia control the building industry, arms and drug trafficking, designer fashion and even the handling of poisonous waste.
The result is a vérité scrapbook that is a dejected indictment of a society where an inclination to violence is what the powerless have in common with the empowered, and the violence is all the more disturbing for being so matter of fact. A band of bragging Mafiosi enjoy a spa night gossiping in their tanning rooms and manicure seats until a short, sharp burst of slaughter. Two thick-witted teenagers, who decide to challenge the local don by stealing from his weapons cache, have a target practice session on a local beach and are gleeful when their new flame-thrower decimates a nearby boat. A young university graduate is taught the ropes of illegally dumping corporate toxic waste from northern Europe around Naples by a mobster businessman. A kid who delivers groceries around a broken-down housing project and a weary bagman who drops off money are both drawn into the widening gang war.
Gomorra moves where even cops fear to tread, embracing the misery and violence with a matter of factness at once riveting and disconcerting. Its gun deaths are abrupt and unceremonious: after a summer watching people die hyperbolic movie deaths, it's chilling to see men killed in so blunt a manner by a generation of unimpressive, petty but relentless men. Yet although this crime story eschews romanticism in favour of a disenchanted, suffocating approach, there's a cinematic skill to Gomorra. Shot in secrecy with a largely non-professional cast in poor neighbourhoods including the Camorra bastion of Scampia, the images are grim and grimy, in stark contrast to the stucco sun-drenched imagery of other Italian films. The Chinese live in a building which has vital exterior walls missing, embryonic hitmen pick their way through a cowshed ankle deep in ordure, the street faces used by director Matteo Garrone make Joe Pesci and Danny Aiello look like supermodels.
Gamorra is a long, slow pulse on a snarled mess of poverty, criminality, corruption, indifference and human venality. Even the film's soundtrack adds to the overall neo-realistic feel, whether it's a teenager dancing awkwardly to a cheesy Neapolitan pop tune or a peaceful scene where workers pack up vials of cocaine interrupted only by the buzz of the blenders and the rustle of the baggies. At one point the film slows things right down to the sound of one man's laboured breathing. He's inside a protective toxic waste suit and, rather than coming across as a manipulative film school trick, it's a potent moment that only enhances the sense of a film that is invigoratingly bleak.
The film's multiple end points are one minor problem with the separateness of the narrative threads. At times the storyline is also chaotic and confusing but that seems appropriate as a symptom of a country's peculiar societal illness. Almost cosmically, everything is out of whack and absolutely nobody seems to have any control.
• On general release from Friday
The full article contains 671 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
