Gommorah - 07 February 2010

Principal cast: Salvatore Abruzzese, Simone Sacchettino, Salvatore Ruocco, Vincenzo Altamura, Italo Renda

Film notes: Director Matteo Garrone (Ospiti; Primo Amore) has taken Roberto Saviano's best-selling expose of the Italian crime organization, the Camorra, and applied every possible cinematic effect to the challenge of depicting a world of crime on the screen. Garrone leaves full explanations of the facts to Saviano’s book, and instead commits his picture to a full-force aesthetic portrayal of a world utterly saturated by criminality, where matter-of-fact murder on a daily basis ensures the rule of vice. To create this whole-world of crime, Garrone films on the streets of Naples and gives himself over two hours of screen time. He multiplies story lines in episodic form, introduces many characters from many walks of life, depicts many schemes, on many scales, for obtaining money or power (or perhaps just a livelihood), and shows many a fate, often violent. Petty punks, craftsmen who happen to work in a mob-run business, a delivery boy, toxic-waste scammers … it takes all sorts to make this world, held together by the relentless exclusion of law and order.

Critics have reached for terms such as “frenzied”, “dizzying”, and “chaotic” to describe the ungovernable life-world of vice that Garrone depicts. Certainly, we are far from the ordered, “family” world of The Godfather. Comorra: sounds like “Gomorrah”.

Gomorrah won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008.