Film Review: Gomorrah

Director: Matteo Garrone

Based on the book of the same name by Robert Saviano, who actually worked for the Camorra crime syndicate unloading illegal deliveries at the dockyard as part of his research. The book isn't an easy book to read through but the stories of corruption through wide spread business in Naples is truly shocking. The film is as bleak as the book with the added feel of authenticity with Italian being the spoken language.

Don Ciro with the enemy in the Scampia Feud

The film follows five different storylines of people involved with the mafia in very different ways that are all linked by the on-going feud between DiLauro crime syndicate and the scissionisti or separatists. There is Don Ciro, a timid man who distributes money to families of imprisoned clan members, who is caught in the middle of the war as he is threatened. Totó who is a 13 year old grocery delivery boy who joins the scissionisti after he returns some guns and a bag of drugs after they are ditched by clan member being chased down by the police. Roberto who is a waste management graduate who ends up working for Franco who makes money by illegally dumping toxic waste in abandoned quarries with dangerous results. Pasquale who is haute couture tailor who works for the Camorra but also has a night job working with a rival Chinese garment factory and finally Marco and Ciro, nicknamed Sweet Pea, two out of control wannabe gangsters who steal mafia guns to play with and rob places with but end up on the wrong side of infamous Camorra.

Marco and Sweet Pea fire off the guns they stole

With many mafia films out of America showing the world as glamorous and full of men in fine suits, this is the ground level in Naples. Even the men with money don't wear anything flashy to avoid drawing attention to themselves in a city with big money to be made with the biggest shipping port in Europe and pushes the highest amount of drugs out of any city in the world. The whole film has a dingy and bleak feel to it, even out in the countryside around the city still feels tainted and ugly based on what you have seen. It leaves you in doubt that every facet of the economy in the city has the mob involved and not just at a local level.

The film cuts out a lot of the tit for tat killings of the turf war as well as much of the torture and shocking deaths that are described in the book, being shot in the back of the head when you weren't expecting it is a sign of respect that your death was purely down to business and nothing personal. If you had disrespected someone personally then you could expect a much more prolonged and painful death. The characters all feel trapped in some way, as if life outside Naples is not worth living which means it feels claustrophobic around the tenements.

3/4 Depressing look at the far reaches of the mafia in Naples