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Friday 9 January 2009

Fear and menace

Gomorrah
15, Nationwide

Here, director Matteo Garrone, along with his five co-writers (including Saviano), has not so much distilled the book, as teased out a few narrative threads; a 13-year-old boy eager to get on to the first rung of the Camorra ladder (don’t do it, son!); two knucklehead young men who think they can operate alone; Franco, the smooth-talking businessman who is filling the nearby land with toxic waste; an exploited tailor tempted away by Chinese competitors. It is all shot in a highly naturalistic way, almost like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, in a series of such telling glimpses that, for example, even though we only meet a woman called Maria twice, maybe three times throughout the film, we are shown all we need to know about her just by a glimpse of her kitchen.

In fact, there are many stand-out scenes: the two knuckleheads going berserk with machine guns on a deserted beach, just for the hell of it; the tailor getting into bed with his wife, their baby between them, a symbol of innocence; the trucks moving in to fill the earth with poison; a visual metaphor, presumably, for the way the Camorra poisons whatever it touches and then poisons whatever that touches. There is some violence, but it is not excessive and it is never lingering. Plus, it’s the sense of fear and menace that does you in anyway.

Still, it can be confusing. The Camorra is mostly made up of in-fighting clans, and I was never clear about who was fighting whom, or who even was on which side. However, this could just be me, as I am notoriously bad at keeping up with this plot aspect of mafia films, and will generally annoy everybody by asking over and over, ‘But who killed Uncle Frankie, and why?’ (My partner and teenage son will usually just tell me to shut the hell up, which doesn’t help much, or as I will put it to them, ‘Yes, but I still don’t understand who killed Uncle Frankie. Or why’). Whatever, my confusion didn’t seem to matter very much, probably because this film isn’t about its plot. It’s about money being everywhere — we see it all the time, changing hands or being counted — and yet nothing being of value at all. I can’t recall a single moment of tenderness.

This is an extraordinary film that really does get under your skin. Go see it — you must; you’ve seen nothing like it — and don’t cross me, or I may have no alternative but to take out a contract on you. I’m thinking Sundays after 7 p.m., so watch out.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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